Should 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? They are very important issues and will increasingly define what we do online in the future. Privacy online is becoming more and more of an issue and is the lack of this privacy for many of us to use technology to enable us to surf anonymously.
Take for example geotargeting, a term you may have heard of . This is basically the way what you see on a web site depends on the country you are surfing from. 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. The social networking sites, YouTube and facebook for instance are blocked in many countries. Take Turkey for instance, because of a few videos posted on the video sharing site about Kemal Ataturk, this was all it took to get the site blocked on 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. Of course there are many more examples of this – China are well known for censoring the internet content to their citizens but did you know that Australia have also an extensive blacklist of sites that get blocked.
Of course it’s important to stay anonymous to protect yourself from hackers and ID theft , but it’s also important for protecting our liberty and freedom of speech online, oh and you can even use it to watch BBC IPlayer abroad !