How concerned should an average user be and what are the biggest risks?
People expose themselves online in all kinds of ways they would not do if they realized their vulnerability. Anyone who surfs the Internet should be concerned about the amount of information that’s shared as well as how long it’s kept. Your trail of information accumulates with data points giving a wide range of personal information to those seeking it. These data points are often sold to marketing companies who will then use your personal information to market to you with annoying pop-ups, spam emails and even worse, for example, possibly sell the information to health insurance companies who track what health information you’ve been seeking, then use it against you by increasing your rates. In 2006 AOL released “anonymized” search logs for 650,000 users. There was no “identifying information” attached to individual searches, but all searches done by the same person could be grouped together under some “anonymous” identifier. A reporter at the New York Times was able to identify one o
