Privacy issues have long been discussed in this age of high wired internet society. Popular sites have been questioned with regards to withholding their patrons personal information and so far, they have provided adequate response to their needs. Google for instance had dealt with issues such as with holding information about their users during the time when the idea of tracing mp3 downloaders was being brought up.
However, it doesn’t seem to answer some questions as to what extent are its users going to be protected and is what deemed to be private by the patrons in accordance to the Website managers standards? Things do not turn out so good especially when this reporter from New York Times called up a 62 yr. old lady named Therma Arnold from Lilburn Georgia and told about the information he was able to glean from her life with the use of the search engine powered by America Online.
Ms. Arnolds was shocked to say the least. She was quoted saying “My goodness its my whole personal life.” What is more disturbing is the fact that one could be traced by anyone in the world. You can be traced if your tracker has an inkling of the items you search online or by your postal address. The site can feature the things that you have been looking at recently. This may not be worrying to some but it can be downright embarrassing or be used as a blackmailing material for those who looked up information about their terminal disease or those who enjoyed pornography. You might also want to get extra protection lest your banking transactions online might get viewed as well.
One can easily be caught unaware as this information can easily be gotten from the cookies that one acquires from internet surfing. Furthermore, the AOL database is powered by Google, one of the most powerful search engines in the world. If you have a Google account, it might tie in information available to the services that you use such list of contacts, scheduler and the like. The website you visit can also be traceable if they use the Ad Words function of Google.
This data intensive collection has been justified by Google’s management as a tool for delivering better services to their constituents. They argue that if they learn the habits and tendencies of the users per se, then they would be able to adjust to cater to the needs of the people. You as an individual, are you ready to be the one to sacrifice your privacy in the name of better service? Perhaps we should have a better compromise.
For now, we are forced to deal with the system. To try to protect ourselves from such instances, it would be beneficial to delete the cookies on your Temp Folder or get a software to delete them automatically.
Mara Angeli
http://www.jump2top.com