They’re fighting over your personal information, and you’ll need some armour to maintain your privacy online
Rupert Neethling
The unflattering picture of a person who wants to safeguard his online privacy is typically of a man who doesn’t want to get caught visiting porn sites. Especially if he’s cyber-leching on company time.
But the issue of Internet privacy affects more than just the wired wanker – it involves anyone who uses e-mail, browsers or newsreaders. It has become increasingly easy to track your every move – and to know exactly who you are. The problem was highlighted this month when United States privacy watchdogs voiced their outrage at DoubleClick (www.doubleclick.com), regarded as the world’s largest online advertiser, for tracking surfers by name and address as they move from one site to the next.
DoubleClick is able to do this by correlating two different sources of data: the unique computer identifiers or “cookies” its partner sites drop on unwitting users’ hard drives, and the Abacus database – an offline repository with detailed information on millions of American households.
The surfing records made possible by cookies are matched up with the Abacus database by means of websites around the world that participate in DoubleClick’s new identity-matching program. The widespread condemnation of DoubleClick’s practices follows on the outcry late last year after the discovery that RealNetworks’s popular RealJukebox audio player was sending individual users’ information back to the company’s website. RealNetworks responded by issuing a patch that disabled this feature in the RealJukebox player.
But is it really so serious? Isn’t it just the people who have something to hide that get upset about all this? Don’t advertisers have a right to monitor people who visit the websites that can only exist in the first place because they sponsor them?
The answer given by a growing number of privacy advocates is that most Web users are unaware of the extent to which their details are being siphoned while they surf. And many advertisers who make a business out of selling your details to others don’t regard it as a priority to call your attention to the information they’re capturing. Nor do many of them explain fully what they are going to do with the details you freely give out when you fill in an online form.
Meanwhile, opposition to “secret” digital profiling is giving rise to a new commercial model whereby companies who would like to sell you something claim to be open about their policies, inviting you to deal through them since they won’t sell your information and they’ll protect your privacy while you buy from their approved merchants.
Two examples of this new model are Enonymous.com and WorldPrivacy.com. As part of its drive for a non-invasive electronic marketplace, Enonymous offers free browser- enhancing software that helps you take back control over your personal information as you visit websites. It also supplies ratings that indicate how likely a site is to respect your privacy. Many South African sites, according to Enonymous, have a 0% privacy rating.
WorldPrivacy.com, a fully commercial venture, promises to remove members’ details from offline and e-mail marketing databases while providing them with a secure and private online shopping environment. But these efforts represent only a small step towards reclaiming your anonymity on the Web. Sophisticated software and services are rapidly being developed to give users a greater level of control when they go online.
World Wide WebJunkbusters (www.junkbusters.com) offers a free program that can be set selectively to delete cookies and block ad banners. CDR Software’s “Private Surfer” program (www.cdrsoft.com) goes even further: it encrypts your Web browser activity, in the process hiding what websites you visit, your Web-based e-mail, any information you supply in forms, and the content you download from websites. CDR Software claims that with Private Surfer, not even your Internet service provider can see what you’re viewing.
Online services such as idzap.com and anonymizer.com don’t require you to install any software: using their services, you can keep websites from tracking you and from acquiring data stored in your browser. Truste (www.truste.org) is a watchdog organisation that advises Web users on sites that do not violate your privacy. Approved sites carry the Truste logo or “trustmark”.
A growing number of Internet services are coming online to keep your electronic mail safe from prying eyes. Foremost among these is ZipLip (www.ziplip.com), an innovative service for individuals and businesses that scrambles and password-protects your e-mail so that no one but you can read it. Importantly, once your message is read, ZipLip destroys it so that no viable copy can be retrieved later from a server archive. The Nymserver (www.nymserver. com) is touted as one of the most secure e-mail systems on the Internet, keeping your identity private by routing your mail via a “fake” e-mail address and encrypting all your messages. The Internet has made it abundantly clear that knowledge is power.
On the one end of the spectrum, your personal information is a commodity. On the other, it is a weapon that can be used against you. Either way, today you have access to the tools that can keep your life story from falling into undesirable hands, putting the commodity/ weapon switch firmly in your hands.
ENDS