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As long as I keep people off my computer, there’s no way
anyone can find out what sites I visited on the internet. Right? Wrong. Terribly
wrong. Google knows how you vote and a lot of other stuff about you.
TOR or The Dark Web
If you plan to do something shady or even illegal on the
internet, maybe you should use TOR (The Onion Router). TOR goes through a
series of steps before it connects you to that disreputable site. It’s a good
way to cover up your tracks. It was used by Ross William Ulbricht, a former
eagle scout to set up a black market he called The Silk Road, a black market
for illegal products. Before you go the The Silk Road through TOR, though, I
should tell you that Ulricht is now a guest at the Metropolitan
Correctional Center
in New York .
A school administrator in Vancouver used TOR (also called the Dark Web)
to look at child porn. Unfortunately for him the FBI are great hackers. They
had hacked the porn site and got the email addresses of visitors. With the
email address they were able to get the name and address of visitors to the
site.
New Technology
As we accept new technology into our lives, we create
opportunities for hackers, including law enforcement, to spy on us. Everything
from smart TVs to web-connected cars open doors to the secrets we mistakenly think
are actually secret. With the Internet of Things we can control lighting,
thermostats, door locks, and other things from our smartphone and from a distance.
Even toasters can be connected to the internet and sending information (about
your toasting habits?) to the cloud. Even some Barbie dolls and baby monitors
are connected to the internet. As time goes by, bit by bit, we give up more and more of
our privacy.
When you look at
those ads online, they’re looking right back at you
Do you remember when you looked up those jogging shoes you
were interested in, and later an ad for those shoes popped up when you looked
at Facebook on your cell phone? How did they do that? When you looked the shoes
on your browser, the site added cookies, invisible little tags that allowed
them to follow your activities from site to site, and even from connected
device to another, from your laptop to your phone.
These sites not only know that you looked at the page for
jogging shoes, they know something about you, like your socio-economic
situation, your approximate age, your gender, your health concerns, and your
political affiliation.
Just need your phone
number
Hackers
don’t need a lot of information about you to find out all they want to know. In a recent demonstration in 60 Minutes, armed with just the phone,
hackers from Security Research Labs were able to hear and record calls made on
the phone, see the contacts on the phone, and get the numbers of every incoming
call. They were also able to get the location of the owner of the phone.
Google Knows
Before you read this article, please take this short survey—
Once you take the survey, Google knows a lot about you and
not just about the topic of the survey itself. Even if you don’t take the
survey, Google can infer a lot about you from your browsing history, things
like your age and gender. They can determine your location from your IP
address. Using the information they have gleaned, Google can create a
representative sample of any demographic group.
You may think that no one is watching, but when you’re on
the internet, someone is always watching.
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