Privacy in the online world.

In the pre Internet days only your neighbors, friends and family could snoop into our private affairs unless someone hired a private investigator. Nowadays with most of our activities revolving around the Internet, we can conduct our activities from communication, shopping, banking to almost anything on-line without literally stepping out of our homes. This is so convenient and great but our life and affairs are exposed to anyone who wants to track us anonymously by the cookies that trace every footprint that we leave in cyberspace. Strangers snoop, track, categorize, assimilate, file and analyze all of this information by stalking us on-line and make money off our activities.

Before the “Do Not Call List” came out we got swamped every evening at dinnertime with telephone calls from marketers who wanted to sell us one product or the other and then everyone registered in the Do Not Call telephone list. Similar to that is the “Do Not Track List” being put together by privacy groups like the Consumer Federation of America, the World Privacy Forum and the Center for Democracy and Technology who say that tracking our on-line activities is an invasion of our privacy and when companies collect information about a computer user then they should be notified and given options to opt out. Now how effective are these opt out cookies is another issue.

Also with the government watching over every individuals movements and spying on them, innocent activities could be construed as suspicious and our activities can be subpoenaed by the government authorities.