Do you remember a time before everyone knew your every move?
Maybe it’s our own fault. We live in an age where microblogs and social networks are all about keeping in touch—to the extreme. It’s fun to follow friends, so we forget that posting pictures of that drunken holiday party might not bode well for future relationships
with employers, friends, or even the law. We forget that, sometimes, giving just a little tells a lot. You can’t do anything online without signing up for an account, typically supplying your e-mail, at a minimum. End-user license agreements (EULAs) today are more invasive than ever. Disney put one out that’s over 50 pages long—for a DVD of Sleeping Beauty. Even “don’t be evil” Google took flack for the Chrome browser EULA, which proclaimed the corporation owned whatever you might post through it. Google changed that policy—eventually. But the company still hangs on to plenty of information about its users, the better to sell you stuff. All that sounds innocuous compared with full-blown identity theft, but identity theft wouldn’t be a plague if our personal data weren’t out there for the taking—and it’s definitely out there. Companies like PallTech, an
online service for investigators and collection agencies, have databases with just about every American’s name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number.
Have we as a culture abandoned our right to privacy? Absolutely not. While it’s easy to lose hold of, it’s also easier than ever to get back. The newest Web browsers take privacy seriously, and they’re just the beginning. We’ll show you how to go online and surf as stealthily as
can be, so the chances of your being ID’d without your consent, or having your ID stolen, are slim to none. All the major browsers for Windows—Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Chrome 0.2, Opera 9.6, and Safari 3.1.2—offer some kind of security and privacy settings, at the very least to give you control over cookies, cached files, and your stored surfing history. How it’s done is a
little different in each browser.
