Secret Surfing: How to keep prying eyes away from your Web browser, e-mail, and IM.
By Paul Boutin | Slate | Dec. 27, 2007
[ How often does this subject come to mind? Too often. There are some good embedded articles in this one.]
Nearly a decade ago, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy snapped out a warning to the worriers of the Internet Age:
"You don't have any privacy. Get over it."
McNealy's words look more prescient every year. In 2006, AOL unwittingly divulged the personal lives of 650,000 customers by publishing their search histories as research data. Despite AOL's attempts to anonymize the info, the New York Times quickly outed a 62-year-old lady in Georgia whose searches revealed her dog was wetting the upholstery. The Justice Department has subpoenaed Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL for lists of search queries. More recently, Facebook employees were caught reading the customer logs.
With more people putting more of their personal lives online every day, there's a huge potential market for the Web's privacy pushers. A couple of weeks ago, search engine Ask.com tried to poach customers from Google by launching a new service called AskEraser. Worried that Google keeps your search queries for ages? AskEraser allows you to force the company to delete your search history from the company's servers. Great idea, but it's just a start. How can you use the Web, e-mail, and IM without seeing your Internet Explorer history in the New York Times?
Cont.: slate.com
------ |
