Privacy Online Has Gone Away With The Wind

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Privacy Online Has Gone Away With The Wind

Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.

March 1, 2016

Whether we like it or not, whether we accept it or not, we are being tracked all the time. The internet tracks our every move.

Google tracks us, on both its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same, and surprisingly, it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple even tracks us on our devices such as iPhones, iPads etc.

What we do on the internet is combined with other data about us. Everything we do is on computers; everything is being saved. Big companies make tons of money just by building up intimate profiles of our lives from a variety of sources and using that to sell specific products to us.

According to CNN, one reporter once used a tool called collusion to track who was tracking him and he found out that 105 companies were tracking his internet use during one 36 hour period. And the most surprising thing of all is that governments are big supporters of these companies spying on us. They are mostly the ones who pay these companies to track us and to save what we search online. This, from their point of view, helps them know what people are up to. This has actually helped a few times, as governments have identified and arrested people who were involved in terrorism or communicating with terrorist groups who were trying to plot attacks.

We can take measures to stop this, to stop being tracked, to protect our privacy. We can limit what we search on Google from our phones, and we can instead use web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. But increasingly, none of it matters because there are too many ways to be tracked. The internet, email, cell phones, web browsers, social networking sites, search engines…we use these on a daily basis. Maintaining privacy on the internet is completely impossible now.

So, as CNN puts it, “Welcome to a world where your cell phone company knows exactly where you are all the time. Welcome to the end of private conversations. Welcome to a world where all this, and everything else you do or is done on a computer, is saved, correlated, studied, passed around from company to company without your knowledge or consent. Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we’ve ended up here with hardly a fight.”

 

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    elenaarrowsmithApr 5, 2016 at 10:23 am

    This article really opened up my eyes and made me remember to be more careful on the internet. I need to remember that anyone can see what I do and the delete button doesn’t mean it will be gone forever.

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    destinyheidFeb 13, 2016 at 7:56 pm

    I love the layout and the picture you chose. It really caught my attention, and the writing is so amazing. I absolutely love it

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