I don’t know if this belongs here or in paranoia! Perhaps both. Anyway, the other day I was trying to locate an old friend and I decided to turn to the internet for help. Find them I did and a hole lot of other information I had no business knowing. I was shocked at how easy it is to obtain peoples personal information! It is completely obscene! Does anyone have ideas on how to maintain at least some privacy on line? How can you be as anonymous as possible? In real life you can’t unless you never get a drivers license, never register to vote, never get a credit card or even apply for credit etc. But people should have some privacy on line!
The only information on the Internet pertaining to you (unless you submitted something yourself) is your credit report, phone number, and address; obviously this is excluding what sites like 1-800-USSEARCH have to offer, which can (for a reasonable price) provide criminal records, driving records, etc.
I once bouight a cd off ebay once, and didnt understand the address I was to mail payment to, so in 5 minutes or less I not only discovered that it was a dorm room address on some college, but got a diagram of the dorm, roome location/floor/proximity to entrance ,and knew which bed the dude slept in, on which walls there were phone jacks/power outlets, doors/windows/bathroom placement.....That kinda scared me. I mean this was BEFORE I bought my first pc and was using the one at work to ebay and email...no pc skills at all.
If you don't want people to obtain your personal information don't tell anybody! If there's a situation where you must transmit personal info, make sure you're transfering it to a secure host over a secure tunnel.
Now that is scary! I have decided the internet is evil! It is just amazing how much info you can get just by searching various free databases. You don’t even need to prove that you have a legit need for the info.
Yes, I aggree with that person as far as posting something on the net, make sure you are dealing with a website you trust, and make sure you have your cookies set to three on the privacy section of internet explorer if that is what you use. Also be sure to install a spyware removual program such as addaware. That is what I use on my xp computer and did not have any problems since I did however upgrade to xpsp2. It works great! Just thought I would help out.
Another program that is good is Spybot search and destroy. You can get it free at the pcworld magazine web site.
Yes I agree with that. You should protect your computer as much as possible. I have an anti- virus, and a fire wall which I keep updated and always get te new versions of these programs when they come out. I also have spybot, spy gate (both free programs) and ontrack internet clean up. I also have hijack this but, I don’t know how to read the info it gives or tell what programs are ok to delete. Does anyone know how these proxy servers work and are they necessary or worth it. I have also seen programs like anonymiser, is that program any good? I never give out personal info on line. Anyway, even if you do everything above people can still get you personal information if they know what database to search!
