Our digital footprints are growing exponentially. Humans have become digital creatures. Let’s look at different ways in which your internet privacy is at threat.
- Photographs on the Internet – Today many people post their photographs online. Any individual can be unwillingly tagged in a photo and displayed in a manner that might violate them personally in some way, and by the time social media gets to take down the photo, many people will have already had the chance to view, share, or distribute it. These pictures can allow other people to invade a person’s privacy by finding out information that can be used to track and locate a certain individual. Face recognition technology can be used to gain access to a person’s private data. By combining image scanning, cloud computing, and public profiles from social network sites to identify individuals in the offline world.
- Privacy issues of social networking sites – Social Networking sites have caused social profiling and is a growing concern for internet privacy. Social Networking sites facilitate participatory information sharing and collaboration on the internet, in social networking media websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and MySpace. These social networking sites have seen a boom in their popularity starting from the late 2000s. Through these websites, many people are giving their personal information out on the internet. There is a growing number of people that are discovering the risks of putting their personal information online and trusting a website to keep it private. Once information is online it is no longer private. It is an increasing risk because younger people are having easier internet access than ever before, therefore they put themselves in a position where it is all too easy for them to upload information, but they may not have the caution to consider how difficult it can be to take that information down once it has been out in the open. This is becoming a bigger issue now that so much of society interacts online.
- HTTP cookies – An HTTP cookie is data stored on a user’s computer that assists in automated access to websites or web features, or other state information required in complex websites. It may also be used for user-tracking by storing special usage history data in a cookie, and such cookies — for example, those used by Google Analytics — are called tracking cookies. Cookies are a common concern in the field of Internet privacy. Social networking profiles could be connected to cookies, allowing the social networking profile to be connected to browsing habits.
- Flash cookies – Flash cookies are a popular mechanism for storing data on the top most visited sites. Flash cookies, also known as local shared objects, work the same ways as normal cookies and are used by the Adobe Flash Player to store information on the user’s computer. They exhibit a similar privacy risk as normal cookies but are not as easily blocked, meaning that the option in most browsers to not accept cookies does not affect Flash cookies.
- Evercookies – are JavaScript-based applications that produce cookies in a web browser that actively “resist” deletion by redundantly copying themselves in different forms on the user’s machine (e.g., Flash Local Shared Objects, various HTML5 storage mechanisms, window. name caching, etc.), and
resurrecting copies that are missing or expired. Evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in several types of storage mechanisms that are available on the local browser. It has the ability to store cookies in over ten types of storage mechanisms so that once they are on one’s computer they will never be gone. Additionally, if evercookie has found the user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it recreates them using each mechanism available.
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