Media Law Blog Nine

Privacy is a luxury that has a steadily growing premium on it. The internet collects more and more information every day, on you, your friends, your family, even your pets. All of it winds up on the internet and the information gets stored there forever. Web browsers are built to track your every move with features like cookies that cashe information for later use. Targeted ads are becoming increasingly more frequent and accurate. The second you go onto a website, that action is logged, the items you clicked on were logged, and now the ads you see from now on will begin to reflect what you looked at. There are options in most browsers to turn off data tracking and search engines like google allow you to turn off target ads. There are positives and negatives to doing this. The negative is that ads quickly become repetitive. The positive is that at least a fraction of your actions online are protected from advertisers.
    Proxies are almost a necessity at this point. They screen your data use by bouncing it to other ips, protecting you. This is one of the first and best defenses against hackers as well as other outside sources attempting to gain your information. There's no doubt that every step you take leaves a ripple online. Anything you post can be recovered to some degree thanks to websites like the wayback machine and the internet archive. There are repositories of knowledge created by people who have nothing better to do with their time. Don't let those people have your personal information and work to protect yourself by treading your step online.