Internet privacy

Levels of privacy

People with only a casual interest in Internet privacy need not achieve total anonymity. Regular Internet users with an eye to privacy may succeed in achieving a desirable level of privacy through careful disclosure of personal information and by avoiding spyware. The revelation of IP addresses, non-personally-identifiable profiling, and so on might become acceptable trade-offs for the convenience that such users would otherwise lose in using the workarounds needed to suppress such details rigorously. On the other hand, some people desire much stronger privacy. In that case, they may use Internet anonymity to ensure privacy — use of the Internet without giving any third parties the ability to link the Internet activities to personally-identifiable information of the Internet user.

Risks to Internet privacy

Those concerned about Internet privacy often cite a number of privacy risks — events that can compromise privacy — which one may encounter through Internet use. Unfortunately, given the complexity of Internet privacy, many people do not understand the issues. Therefore this section covers not only "real" privacy risks, but also risks perceived as overemphasized.

Example : Browsing profiles

The process of profiling (also known as "tracking") assembles and analyses several events, each attributable to a single originating entity, in order to gain information (especially patterns of activity) relating to the originating entity. On the Internet, certain organizations employ profiling of people's web browsing, collecting the URLs of sites visited. The resulting profiles may or may not link with information that personally identifies the people who did the browsing.

Some web-oriented marketing-research organizations may use this practice legitimately, for example: in order to construct profiles of 'typical Internet users'. Such profiles, which describe average trends of large groups of Internet users rather than of actual individuals, can then prove useful for market analysis. Although the aggregate data does not constitute a privacy violation, some people believe that the initial profiling does.

Profiling becomes a more contentious privacy issue, on the other hand, when data-matching associates the profile of an individual with personally-identifiable information of the individual.

Governments and organizations may set up honeypot websites - featuring controversial topics - with the purpose of attracting and tracking unwary people. This constitutes a potential danger for individuals.

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