Online Privacy

This article discusses Internet privacy. It talks about how the Internet isn’t really free like most people think it is but more of an exchange of information. When we visit sites such as Facebook and Google they are gathering information from us as we are surfing the sites. There is a newly released privacy add-on for Firefox and Chrome that allows you to instantly check your privacy settings across Facebook, Google and other sites. It allows you to fix privacy settings and notifies you when the policies have changed so you can update your privacy. The article also mentions that Congress and the executive branch have been talking more about online privacy in the past couple of years, which may mean some changes for the future.

The article is a good example of online privacy and highlights the fact that our privacy settings may not always be as private as we think they are. With changing policies and updates we don’t always realize when privacy policies have changed. I thought I had my Facebook as private as it could be but recently I noticed that people I’m not friends with have been liking my photos. It wasn’t until then that I realized that the privacy settings must have changed and my photos were no longer private. The Privacyfix add-on discussed in the article is supposed to notify you when things like this change and highlights parts of the settings we may want to look at.

It seems that these days it is getting harder and harder to control what information gets revealed about ourselves on the Internet. We still have some control but there are the things such as cookies and spy ware that are gathering information about what we do on the Internet that we don’t have control over. In the future I can only imagine it is going to get worse with new technologies, programs and even hackers and attacks. Privacy on the web is hardly privacy at all.

It is hard to stay private when all the different applications on the Internet are gathering information from us, even apps we no longer use or our friends apps. Also the fact that sites like Facebook are sharing our information with other websites automatically. There is privacy on the web, its just becoming harder to control.