Are You Being Watched? On The Web
The Internet is a network which has much to offer but you can give away a lot of information about yourself, if you are not careful. It's important to recognise that the Internet is international and largely unregulated. This means that the laws of any one country don't usually apply to Internet activities originating in other countries.
When 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: You are better of understanding privacy related issues and technologies that can affect your identity online.
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.
Why are cookies used? Generally, for those of us that access the Internet through a public ISP, each request we make to a website cannot be linked to a previous request, as each request does not contain a permanent unique identifier. 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. For example, if you provide extra information about yourself to the website by buying something online or subscribing to a free service, then the cookies can be used to build up a profile of your buying habits and what you are interested in.
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 Net Pal, 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 Hyper Text 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 email 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 email address.
Email and Cryptography
Email is more like a post card than a letter in an envelope. Anyone who intercepts your email can read it if it's sent as plain text. This may not matter to you but if you would prefer your email to be readable only by those you send it to then you might consider encrypting it. PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a popular and free program that uses cryptographic techniques to protect information.
For more information on privacy issues visit www.privacylaw.org and www.truste.org
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