Digital Footprint

The book I read to research this post was Digital Footprint by Simon Webb which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. I'm not sure but I think this book may have been free and is only short but is really interesting. It's about how the information you supply in the form of your history on social media sites, your emails and what you search for in search in search is used to tailor adverts supposedly to suit you and definitely to make money from you. This has a dark side in that if you are after promotion at work, or a loan from a bank or even the amount of insurance you pay is influenced by these firms that collect information about you from the web. Do you wonder why companies like Yahoo offer free email it's because they scan your unencrypted emails for information about you and sell it to a web marketing company. In the book if you're wondering they recommend an email provider called http://hushmail.com which encrypt your emails and don't sell the information in your emails to anyone. There is over 200 companies worldwide that do a deal with web site owners and put cookies on these sites that give them information about you. A search engine they recommend if you don't want your searches logged is http://duckboards.com. The website is rather basic in design though. This book has loads of addresses of resources for internet privacy and obviously I've only mentioned a couple. Another issue as well is getting information from devices like tablets & mobile phones which usually aren't as well protected as your computer and you can use VPN's or Virtual Private Networks for protection. Finally there is also plug ins for all the major browsers that help prevent your internet information being logged.