February 2004

Over the past ten years the Internet has evolved from a little-known government communications experiment to a revolutionary new medium for media delivery, commerce, and financial exchanges. The rising prominence of the Internet has spawned a bevy of service-oriented behemoths like Amazon.com and Ebay, providing sales of everything from books and music to financial services to eager consumers. File-sharing networks like Kazaa and Gnutella allow millions of computer users around the world to share information, while major news sources provide discerning current events buffs with a slew of updates on the world at large.

The Internet has definitely changed the way people communicate with each other while also providing both companies and consumers new, convenient ways to conduct business and deliver services. But as with any maturing medium of information delivery, the Internet of late has become prey to a host of opportunists eager to capitalize on unknowing consumers' naivety about the Internet.

Knowledgeable identity thieves can prowl the Internet seeking unwitting individuals' personal information while determined marketers can plant cookies in unsuspecting web-surfers' browsers in order to provide data-miners with constant updates of a person's web-surfing habits. Private emails can be read by varying people before reaching their destinations and every web site an individual has ever visited can be traced back to that person, providing anyone with the ability to check someone's web activity a complete history of that person's Internet-based activities.

While using the Internet does leave web-surfers vulnerable to information piracy and clandestine data mining by zealous marketers, a prepared Internet-user can combat the amorphous, faceless entities that constantly hound the millions of people who visit cyberspace daily. Using an assortment of computer software, security services, and common sense, the average computer-user can avoid the furtive pitfalls of the Internet while still enjoying the convenience of surfing, shopping, and email.

A basic understanding of how a personal computer communicates with the Internet can be as important a tool in preserving Internet privacy as email spam filters and security software. Every computer connected to the Internet is assigned an Internet Protocol (IP) address. This IP address is recorded by every web site a web-surfer visits. Each individual web site keeps a registry of activities conducted while on the site, files transferred, and any financial transactions undertaken. Should someone feel so inclined, they could trace back a user's IP address directly to them. Normally this entails an IP address leading to a home service provider such as AT&T, Earthlink, or AOL. While many of these Internet providers claim to have stringent privacy policies, many others do not. And if someone waving a court order comes looking for an IP address behind the wall of privacy Internet providers offer, those service providers will relinquish sensitive information.