Web Privacy
by Peter ShelburnWhen considering web privacy we are thinking about the information that we reveal on the web and how this information is going to be used. Some people may not be concerned with their web privacy or even aware that it can be an issue.
For example, people that are not technically savvy and simply surf the web to explore web sites may not understand that their surfing habits are being tracked. Even if they knew, would they be concerned?
On the other hand there are people that are concerned with their web privacy and they may go out of their way to protect it. For example, they may set a high level of filtering in their browser security settings to block cookies.
Their IP address is harder to block, but they may surf behind a proxy server which gives them an anonymous IP address for added privacy.
Browser plug-ins may be used to block Ads which is not directly related to web privacy but shows the kind of mindset the privacy concious person may have.
Levels of web privacy range from being anonymous such as being protected by a proxy server (assuming that this server is not gathering information) to being logged in as a registered user of a web site. In this case you may have provided personal information such as your telephone number, home address and full name.
So levels of trust come into play. The less trustworthy a site is, the less personal information you are likely to want to reveal. One way to gain a level of trust for a web site is to look for their privacy policy. This is a statement that explains their policy on how they gather and use personal information.
Unless you fill in forms on a website, you are not usually revealing much personal information. The common information that you reveal is your IP address which may reveal which ISP you are using to connect to the web and your approximate location, the time and duration of your visit and which web pages you viewed.
The software you use with your web browser such as plug-ins and tool bars may affect your personal web privacy since they are interacting with your web browser and hence they can feed data to remote websites as well as pulling data from those sites. An example would be a tool that checks the status of every web site that you visit with a remote service. Then that remote service can track your browsing habits.
When visiting web sites that use 3rd party visitor tracking services, your web privacy may be affected in that your movements between various web sites can be tracked.
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