Privacy on the Internet??
Does it exist?
When you are surfing from the privacy of your home, should the server/company you are visiting be able to find out information about you? The perception among many is that cookies can find out your age, address, income, just about anything they want. Is it true? Visit Cookie Central for the real story.
Another concern is the ability of a site to track you using your IP address, many times an IP address can lead to an email address, which in turn can lead to more information. This also allows business to track your internet activities in order to target you for marketing use, spam email, and whatever else they desire. If this is a concern, you may want to use an anomyizer service.
Some internet users believe that their email is safe and secure. The rule of thumb is that you should not write a message that you would not want to have posted on a bulletin board. Numerous court cases have established that employers have the right to monitor and read your email. Your employer has the right to discipline you, including termination of employment, for "inappropriate" use of email. If this might be a concern to you, you may want to use an anonymous mail service like Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo Mail. You may also want to check out on of the remailers available like bigfoot.com. That service will remail any email to the address you choose.
How much of your information is available on the net? You might be surprised! Perhaps, you may be able to find a friend, old classmate, lost relative. Who Knows? Explore, have fun!
Search
Infospace.
Includes white
and yellow pages, zip code lookup, reverse zip code
and reverse
phone number searches.
Use
Switchboard
Contains search
engines for people, business, and email addresses.
The
Four-11 search engine
The best one
for finding email addresses! An offshoot of the Four-11
engine is
Finding
People at Yahoo.
There are many other subject specific databases also available for our use. You may find them interesting.
If you have an IP address, and want to find a domain name, or vice versa, you can visit the Arin Whois Server or maybe the The Better Whois Search Engine
And now that you know everyone's name, email, address and phone number. Perhaps you would like driving directions to their houses. Mapquest is one of the best!
and of course, Google does it all!
To see what kind of information is available for sale check out InfoUSA which is just one of hundreds of direct marketing firms.
Here is another site that sells lists of peoples names, addresses, phone numbers, education level, salary level etc.
Another age old practice is the selling and sharing of registration data bases. What happens when you fill out an informational item, when you purchase something on the net. How secure is that information. For one company's response, you may want to take a look at Disney's official position.
And finally, for all you ever
wanted to know about privacy in the digital age. Visit
CNET for a special report. This will explain your rights, responsibilities,
the laws and almost everything else you want to know.
After all is said and done, there are some ways to protect yourself from the "snoops" on the net. You may want to check at EPIC Online for some great tools.
Last updated February 2008