Privacy On The Internet

The book I read to research this post was Privacy On The Internet by Adam Kumiszcza which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is rather short but contains plenty of interesting information & you might be interested to know I have just done a book review on the book Online Anonymous at http://scratbag.me which is on a similar subject. This book is about the paper trail we leave when we use the internet that others can use to commit identity theft and other things. Many websites use cookies which do provide information about you and where you go on a particular site which are called 1st person cookies but also sometimes they track all your internet usage and they can sell this information called 3rd person cookies. The latter of course you probably want to delete and they do recommend a program called CC Cleaner which gets rid of most. There is a browser called The Onion Ring or Tor Browser which will hide your identity most of the time you are on the internet and one thing it does in particular is hide your location although you will find it runs more slowly than a conventional browser. There is a website that does help hide your internet information at http://www.janusvm.com/tor_vm/ and that site includes the Tor Browser. Search engines are free because generally they store your information which is sold to companies which is why many of the adverts you receive appear tailored to you. There is a couple of search engines that don't do this at http://startpage.com & http://duckduckgo.com. Apparently social media sites are a nightmare when it comes to protecting your personal data. Google + used to force you to display your actual name publicly on your profile although after much pressure this has changed. Facebook used to collect data from your computer whether it was logged into their site or note which they also have changed. Many people don't realize when they comment on social media sites often GPS or location information is extracted by default and you have to go into their settings to turn this off. Bear in mind if you go on a website and are anonymous it might affect the functionality of the site. A final thing I will mention is if you live in a country with an oppressive regime being anonymous on the internet might be essential. This is a really good book which I thoroughly enjoyed and I might review more books on this topic in the near future.