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Internet Privacy

Internet Privacy

Internet users can achieve different levels of privacy, depending on his or her desire to remain anonymous when surfing the net.

Anonymity and Internet privacy have become increasingly important to many users, as more sites log personal information for internet marketing research and targeted marketing through adware, spyware, and spam.

Due to the fact that personal information, such as your IP address, is available to any site that you visit, a series of privacy risks may arise when browsing the web.

The following privacy risks are the most important to be aware of:

Cookies:

Although cookies are very commonly used by many site programmers, they can also be used with malicious intentions.

Cookies are also placed on computers without the user's awareness, which raises further objections by many web surfers. Even though the original intention of cookies was that only the site that placed them could retrieve them, with the information that they already possessed, this is not so in practice. Sites can now use cookies for web profiling to know a specific user's browsing habits and target marketing ads accordingly, among other things.

The most common ways of preventing this is to disable cookies in your browser, which can however limit some site's functionalities, or to frequently erase cookies from your PC.

Web Profiling:

Web profiling, or "tracking", is a process through which information is retrieved about a user's surfing habits, mainly by recording the URL's of visited sites. Additional personal information can also be retrieved through this process.

Some Internet Marketing Research companies use this information legally to draw general Internet surfing stats, but some users still consider the initial profiling as a privacy violation.

Additionally, some organizations set up honeypot websites about controversial issues in order to attract unaware users for profiling.

Ways to circumvent this privacy issue is also to eliminate cookies and, more effectively, to use an anonymous proxy server when browsing the internet.

Data logging:

Many programs, web sites, and operating systems use data logging of their usage. The most common information that is logged is, for example, times when the computer is in use, URL's visited, applications and documents opened recently on the computer, and other habits of use. Due to the fact that this information can be available to intruders, logging information should frequently be erased, such as internet browser cache and operating system histories.

ISPs:

Every time you surf the web, all information goes through your ISP. Although ISPs have the capacity of observing and logging all internet activity of their subscribers, they supposedly do not do this mainly due to ethical and legal issues.

Considerable privacy risks may occur due to the fact that ISPs can log any information sent over the net, and this information can also be made available by the ISP to authorities that request it.

However, ISPs cannot know the information sent over the net if it is encrypted. Due to this fact, https has become a popular standard for web traffic encryption.

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