Privacy and the internetWhen you are surfing the web you may think you are anonymous, but there are various ways that information about you or your activities can be collected without your knowledge or consent. These include: Cookies A cookie is a piece of information that an Internet website sends to your browser when you access information at that site. Upon receipt of the information your browser saves the information on your hard-disk (unless your browser doesn't support cookies). Each time you use your computer to access that same website, the information that was previously received is sent back to the website by your browser. Most commonly used browsers support the use of cookies. Cookies allow website operators to assign a unique permanent identifier to a computer which can be used to associate the requests made to the website from that computer. Cookies indicate to a website that you have been there before and can be used to record what parts of a website you visit. While cookies in themselves may not identify you, in the way a name or address does, a cookie could potentially be linked with other identifying information. Many web surfers object strongly to cookies as they feel that they invade their hard drive without their permission. There are various things you can do to combat cookies if you distrust them, these include: * Setting the browser cookie file to be Read Only. Whether you can do this or not may depend on what sort of Operating System (OS) or browser you are using. But if you can do this then the cookies will only last for as long as your browser is running. * Set up your computer to delete the cookies file whenever you start your browser. * Many browsers allow you to set them up so that you are notified when a cookie is to be written to your computer. However there may be instances where there are so many cookies that it becomes annoying to reject them all. * There are many software products you can get which will reject or manage cookies for you, these include Cookie Crusher, Cookie Pal and Cookie Cruncher. HTTP When you access a web page from a website, the website expects you to provide certain information so that it can provide the page you request. The HyperText transfer protocol (HTTP) is the set of rules that websites and browsers follow in order to communicate. One obvious piece of information the website will require is what page you want to look at. The technical term for the location of this page is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). There are various aspects of HTTP which may allow your surfing activities to be tracked. Other information which may be sent whenever you request a web page includes your e-mail address and the last web page you looked at. Whether this information is transmitted is dependent on whether your browser supports these options and whether you have got your browser configured with your e-mail address. Browsers The most widely used browsers are the various versions of Netscape Navigator and Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Other less widely used browsers include Mosaic, which was one of the original browsers and Lynx which is a text based browser. There have been many reports of security bugs in browsers which can allow hackers and websites to access your personal information while you are surfing the web. Netscape and Microsoft often provide fixes for these bugs soon after they become aware of them, these can be downloaded from their websites. It's difficult to assess the risk to your personal information of using any particular browser, but it may be wise to keep up to date with news about security bugs. Search engines These are web-based software tools that allow you to search for information on the Internet. Some of the most well-known ones are Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Hotbot, Excite, Infoseek and Web-Crawler. Many of these offer facilities to search for people. If your name appears somewhere on the Internet then these search engines can find it. Your name may be associated with other information about you so it may be possible for anyone using search engines to find out quite a bit about you. Some search engines also allow the searching of news groups for postings associated with an e-mail address. Electronic Commerce If you buy something from a commercial web site you will probably have to use a credit card. This means you will be transmitting your credit card number over the Internet. Governments and businesses are keen to encourage Electronic Commerce but there is some resistance by consumers due to concerns about security and privacy. Currently Internet businesses seem to require you to provide more personal information than you would for over the counter purchases. Many people are concerned that this information will then be re-used for another purpose or sold to direct marketers. The way in which you set up your e-mail address may affect your privacy. Like street addresses e-mail addresses are essentially locators, but they locate you in cyberspace rather than real space. The format of an e-mail address is [email protected], where A is your name or handle, B is usually your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or the organisation you work for, C and D are called domains. The C domain may refer to your area of work or activity. For example if you worked for the Government then this would probably be .gov. Many commercial ISPs use either .com or .net. D is the country domain, for Australia this is .au. So an e-mail address for someone who works for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner might be [email protected]. If Fred had a private e-mail account with the ISP Ozemail his private e-mail address might be [email protected]. If Fred wanted a more private e-mail address he may use a handle or nym (from pseudonym) such as [email protected]. The advantage of using a nym is that you can then only reveal your identity to who you want to know it. If you go to the trouble of using a nym you should be careful to set up your e-mail application so that the name and identity fields are left blank. Otherwise this information may be included in your e-mail. If you want to use a nym it is important to use an ISP that has disabled the Finger utility. If this is not disabled then anyone may be able to use your e-mail address to find out your name and other information about you. |