Why Anonymous Surfing is important
Posted by: Ghost in Design, Internet, Technology, amazing, commerce, computers, tags: anonymous, anonymous surfing, geotargetingShould we be worried about the lack of privacy on the internet? Does it bother you that what you can do or see online is increasingly controlled by outside parties? The issues are important ones, they will help shape the future of how we use the internet.
Take for instance the practice of geotargeting, you have probably come across this term online. It refers to the practice of web sites determining what content you can see depending on what country you are based in. For instance, people trying to access the majority of media content on the BBC Iplayer will be blocked if there IP is not registered to the UK, similarly users outside the USA will have no joy connecting to Pandora or Hulu. Your IP address defines what you can access on online, unfortunately we are taking a globally accessible medium and once again segregating people.
Mostly the geotargeting is done for licensing issues of course, but there is an even more worrying aspect of this customising what you can see on the internet. Facebook and Youtube are examples of websites that are blocked by many countries. Take Turkey for instance, because of a few videos posted on the video sharing site about Kemal Ataturk, then the whole site got blocked from mainland Turkey.
These sites are meant to be about wide opinions, people posting different views and experiences, but this heavy handed censorship is controlling what people hear, say and do on the internet. There are of course many other examples of this, China are well known for censoring their content, but did you know that Australia have an extensive list of websites that are blocked.
Anonymous Internet surfing is partly about protecting your data from the hackers and identity thieves, but it’s also important for protecting our liberty and freedom of speech online!
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