Family Hotels In Santa Clarita - 5 Techniques For Maintaining Web Confidentiality

Source       - http://news.yahoo.com/
By             - Larry Greenemeier
Category    - Family Hotels In Santa Clarita
Posted By  - Hampton Inn Santa Clarita

Family Hotels In Santa Clarita

So many of the Web’s most popular services—e-mail and search as well as photo and video sharing—may be free, but that doesn’t mean they come without a cost. That price is information about the people using those services as well as their online behavior—intelligence that Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other Internet companies exchange for advertising revenue. The trade-off of privacy for free services is generally acceptable to most Web users, who are used to incessant advertising—and at times even benefit from personalized attempts to sell them products and services.

The darker side of bartering in personal data, however, is that Web users lose control over who has access to their information, which is often shared well beyond the scope of their original understanding. Google uses automated scanning to filter spam and deliver targeted advertising to its Gmail users, claiming they have “no expectation of privacy” when using its free e-mail service. Facebook, meanwhile, recently settled a $20-million class action settlement following a lawsuit over the social network’s lucrative "Sponsored Stories" program that shares users' "likes" of certain advertisers with friends without paying them or allowing them to opt out.

In addition to nuisance ads, unsolicited e-mails and unintended endorsements, this oversharing creates other, more serious threats to privacy, says Seth Schoen, senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Personalized ads could reveal to others a Web user’s sensitive or embarrassing medical condition, particularly if that user shares a computer with others or surfs the Web in a public place. “The better the ad personalization gets, the more significant those consequences could be,” Schoen adds.

Information collected via the Web could also be problematic for a person during legal proceedings. A lot of people don’t realize that subpoena power in civil cases is broader than it is in criminal cases, Schoen says. Internet service providers (ISPs) and other companies doing business on the Web can be forced to turn over most information they have about their users or customers as part of a lawsuit such as an employment dispute or divorce.

Another threat to privacy involves how well Web companies entrusted with their customers’ personal information secure that data from being lost or stolen and used to steal a person’s identity. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that tracks data breaches, reports that nearly 1.8 million data records have been lost or stolen this year from businesses, government agencies and health care facilities. “The risk comes simply from the companies collecting and storing personal information, and it’s not a very unlikely or hypothetical concern,” Schoen says.

Despite this bleak outlook for privacy, there are tools available to Web users designed to protect personal information from prying eyes. None of these tools alone ensures complete privacy or protection from cyber snooping, but they do offer a way to trim the data trails that curtail one’s privacy.