5 Techniques for Maintaining Web Confidentiality
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.
Masking
E-mail, social networks and other online services often request contact and payment information when users sign up. There are no rules, however, that prevent users from disguising their actual e-mail addresses, phone numbers and credit card numbers as a privacy precaution. Abine, Inc., offers a Web browser plug-in for Firefox and Google Chrome called MaskMe that gives people the ability to create aliases for this type of personal information.
The free version of MaskMe creates an alternate e-mail address whenever a Web site asks for a user's e-mail. E-mails from that site can be accessed via a MaskMe in-box or forwarded to a user's regular e-mail account. The "premium" version of MaskMe—$5 per month—enables masked phone numbers, credit cards and access to the MaskMe iOS and Android apps, which let users view info about their Abine accounts from their mobile devices.
Abine's other services include DoNotTrackMe and DeleteMe. The former is a plug-in that prevents Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari browsers from sharing user information with data-collection companies. DeleteMe is a subscription service that removes personal information from the largest people search databases—also known as "information brokers"—on the Web, including Spokeo.com, Intelius.com and WhitePages.com, says Andy Sudbury, Abine co-founder and chief technology officer.
Private browsing
Web browsers store the information about browsing sessions—including pages visited as well as documents and images downloaded—in temporary cache memory to speed up the Web browsing experience. These pieces of info, however, remain available for anyone else subsequently using that same computer. Most popular browsers—including Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera—now feature some type of "private" mode that prevents the browser from storing information about browsing sessions.
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