What Personal Data Might be Revealed While Surfing The Net


Whenever you go on the internet and interact with a website or an online service, you are unwittingly exchanging vast amounts of information. Even if you take some basic steps to enhance your online privacy, there is still a lot of data that can be gathered and collected about you. Some of this data is personal in nature, while other seemingly innocuous pieces can be used to fingerprint you and track you using sophisticated algorithmic methods.

Browsing History

Take a minute to think about all the websites you have visited over the last week. For most of us, our browsing histories consist of a mix of social media, recreational sites, online banking, e-commerce, and a whole load of miscellaneous pages that revolve around a variety of subjects that interest us. Some of the websites we visit, for personal or professional reasons, we wouldn’t want other people to know about.

Many people assume that if they simply tell their internet browser not to store their browsing history, this will prevent anyone else from being able to discover it. However, things aren’t that simple.

Cookies are used for a lot of things online. Most commonly, they are used to store login information, so that we don’t have to log into a website every single time we visit it. But many sites also use tracking cookies, stored on the user’s PC, which can track the user’s browsing habits independently of their browser settings.

The good news is that this is something you can easily prevent. While telling your browser not to record your browsing history will not defeat tracking cookies, you can tell your browser not to allow tracking cookies either.

Location

Every device that accesses the internet is assigned an internet protocol (IP) address. You can think of an IP address as being like a digital license plate which identifies the specific device amongst the many millions online users.

The IP address doesn’t just identify the device in question; it also reveals information about the geographic location of the device. An IP address alone won’t reveal the precise physical location of the device; however, it is possible, at least in principle, to determine an exact location from an IP address with the right resources and know-how. Law enforcement agencies, for example, can obtain GPS coordinates from an IP address.

You cannot opt out of receiving an IP address, nor can you choose what your IP address is. However, by using a VPN, you can hide your IP address and location. It is important to note, when choosing a VPN keep an eye out if it has a strong no-log policy. When you use a VPN, you don’t connect directly to internet sites. Instead, you connect to a VPN server and then tell that server what you want to do online. It is the VPN server that interacts with the website, and the IP of the VPN that sites and services will record.

Device Information

The fact that websites collect information about the device you are browsing on might seem harmless. In fact, it is beneficial in many ways. When a website knows the exact device the user is browsing on, including details such as its screen resolution and processing power, the site can react dynamically. With most internet users now browsing on mobile devices, it is common for websites to rearrange themselves and adjust content to suit whatever device it is viewed on.

What many people don’t realize though, is that this seemingly innocuous information can be combined with other scraps of digital information regarding devices and web browsers, to identify individual users in a process known as fingerprinting. Fingerprinting makes it possible to track users across the internet, even when they take many of the usual steps to obscure themselves.

Preventing websites from collecting device information is all but impossible, and in many ways undesirable.

Preventing online fingerprinting is also tricky, but not impossible. However, you will have to accept that if you want to be entirely untraceable online, you are going to have to alter your browsing habits drastically.

Installing a VPN and combining it with the Tor web browser can significantly enhance your online privacy. But as soon as you use this system to sign into a social media account, or even check your emails, you are opening yourself up to fingerprinting.

User Provided Information

Last, but not least, there is information which we willingly give to websites without thinking about it. Most of us have told multiple sites our names, our addresses, our emails addresses, phone numbers, even our gender, sexual preferences, and what we are looking for romantically. Once we hand this information over, we have very little control over what happens to it.

It is impossible, or at the very least highly impractical, to prevent any information about us being collected when we go online. The best we can do is minimize the amount of, and the types of, data that we expose. But by being aware of what information is collected, and why online services collect it, you can minimize the impact this collection has on your overall online privacy.

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —

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