This is a pretty worrying notion for me, as the Web is equal to life for me. The vast amounts of information, the possibilities to make a living AND a richness in it, and the even more vast amounts of entertainment. It is a very very scary thought to lose it all with a single ball or a single government decision.
Especially since Obama came to the presidency, the government is pushing for the restriction and filtering of the Internet content plus trying to rationalize taping people’s browsing habits. Today i will present ways we are losing our internet freedom and what we can do each to prevent it. Lets start now first with the ways we are losing our dear freedoms:
Ways that we are losing Internet Freedom:
Most of us are pretty well aware of how we are giving out our personal information like we give out carbon monoxide to the air. Social media, blogs, web applications are all asking us for our personal information, and we are giving it out in order to reach the stage we want in the website (such as starting to read an article, being able to post in a forum etc.). Search engines like Google and Bing are really pushing it by associating our Internet history and habits with our accounts that have our real life personal information.
Websites like Facebook and Twitter are making it easy for our much more personal information, such as our home’s locations, our relatives, and our facial features. They can realize what we did in the last 2 hours by seeing our updates (this is not the case if you do not share your personal info on these social networking websites). News websites are making it possible for us to login with our social media, associating our political opinions and our statements with our real life names.
Of course, all this information can be held against us in our court, without anyone having the privilege to ask “how was this information acquired?”, We barely stopped SOPA and PIPA, and we don’t need more fights from today if you take the following steps yourselves.
So the obvious things to do here will be:
- Do not give your very most information like name, surname, home adress, work adress on social networks and websites, or give false / dummy ones like John Smith instead.
- Do not vote for Obama in 2016. He is pretty supportive of the measures to restrict people’s freedoms and write new legistlation that will permit authorities to access your online information and history.
- When leaving a comment (an opinion, a correction, a statement) in different websites, such as news blogs, do not leave you real name, only your e-mail (also a tip: your e-mails should not have your real name and surnames in it) and a dummy name. use http://example.com for the website if you don’t want a backlink / have your website found by others.
- Use Tor , i2p or similar encrypted browsers to do your browsing so it can’t be tracked by authorities.
Last advice should be to choose a liberal ISP or VPN and thanks for reading!
