When the internet first appeared in our homes, few were concerned about what personal information we were revealing. It was exciting, like a huge global chat room were you could reach out to anyone and everyone all over the planet. Nobody really thought twice about revealing their names, addresses and location. Although it was common for people to use pseudonyms, this wasn’t really to do with privacy concerns and more about image.
I remember quite clearly running a night class on basic internet tools and watching people take their first steps with the very basic messaging services of the time. Most were using IRC chat variants and completely blown away by speaking to people from the US in real time from their keyboard. It doesn’t sound very impressive now, but at the time it was incredible.
Nowadays of course it’s all changed, we are constantly besieged about stories of our personal details being lost, stolen or abused. We enter details into our computers and smart phones, send them over the ether using wifi points in our local libraries, airports and coffee shop not realising that anyone with access to the devices in these establishments could quite easily siphon off our data for their own uses. Next time you use a free wifi spot somewhere, try and imagine who is responsible for configuring and supporting that access point – then assess how much of your personal data you would trust that person with.
The reality is that there are now a huge number of criminals who operate solely online. Think about it, imagine the risks of stealing someones details and emptying their bank accounts compared with physically stealing from a shop or individual. It’s much safer particularly when you consider that it can all be done virtually, the cyber criminal can steal from you whilst actually being in a different country or even continent. Imagine how far you’d get trying to recover your money from a cyber criminal living in Brazil or Nigeria.
It’s one of the reasons that VPNs and security products have become so popular, in order to protect these valuable details when you use them online. Of course there is another reason which is also related to your privacy and that’s the rise of geo-targeting. This is the process where a website determines what you can (or more usually can’t) see depending on your location, the VPN helps you control this such as this web page demonstrates on watching the BBC iPlayer from the USA. It’s all about hiding your real IP address from websites you visit so that you can control what you see, not them.
There’s no doubt it’s turning into something of a war. On one side you have criminals and identity thieves actively trying to steal your details in order to make money from them. On the other hand you have websites, corporations and marketing firms tracking, logging and monitoring your online activities in order to control what you see and deliver advertising to your web surfing.
The status quo is not acceptable to many people which is why so many people are using these security products and VPNS. Not only do they add a layer of privacy to your web browsing but they do allow you to bypass blocks and filters across the world. In fact it’s quite incredible how much of the web is filtered in this way due to one reason or another. Obviously you’ve got the country/state level filters in places like China, Iran and Turkey based on religious or ideological views. However there’s even more due to licencing and copyright restrictions, you can watch Hulu from the US and nowhere else, you need to be in Ireland to watch RTE – unless you use an Irish proxy like this and so on.