How Your Privacy is Commonly Compromised Online

Going online is a part of daily life for most of us. Whether it is for our own pleasure, to socialize, or to work, we live in a society which is increasingly encouraging us to be ‘always-on’. Whether we like it or not, if we travel anywhere these days with a smartphone, we are opening ourselves up to all manner of privacy breaches. But this is a problem that can be avoided by not getting a smartphone as older, more basic phones don’t have the same tracking capabilities.

For many of us, going online is a necessity, so the best we can do is to try and mitigate as many of the privacy threats that we face as possible. The good news is that there are a number of relatively simple, painless and free steps that any of us can take to instantly improve our online privacy. You might not be worried about being tracked, for now anyway, but the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown that we must take responsibility for our own data and privacy.

Web Tracking

If you spend any appreciable amount of time browsing the internet, you will almost certainly have noticed that after you search for particular terms or products, you start seeing more adverts for those things. This is an example of web tracking, a way by which various online service providers can learn more about you.

Disabling cookies will help to mitigate this problem but note that without cookies you cannot stay logged in to websites once you leave them. Both legitimate and malicious actors are finding evermore sophisticated methods of tracking users through their web browsing habits. Using a VPN or TOR can also help.

The biggest problem with web tracking is how prevalent and normalized it has become. While you are safe with a site like Thisblogrules.com, you can be all but certain that the online services you use will track you.

Data Collection

Just about everything we do on the internet generates data of some kind. In fact, in today’s world, even if you never go online you will still end up generating data. It is inevitable now that our existences and choices will, to some degree, be recorded and analyzed.

Data is an incredibly powerful tool, unfortunately, there’s not a huge amount we can do as the generation of data is mostly a passive, secondary effect.

Poor Security Practices

This is the biggest problem as far as having our online data and privacy compromised, whether it is on our part as the user, or on the part of website owners, when there are lapses in security protocols and not enough attention is given to ensuring adequate defenses are in place. The majority of data breaches and similar incidents are avoidable. Humans will always be weaker and easier to hack than computers, this is why it is so important to understand good security.

It is becoming ever more difficult for those of us who wish to remain truly anonymous to do so. Even when we take special precautions to hide our identities online, the services we use are finding increasingly sophisticated methods of tracking us anyway.