[dropcap]T[/dropcap]oday, we live in a digital age with rapidly growing technologies to enhance and express our freedom of communication. From social network platforms to ecommerce, virtual collaborations between people from very distant and different geographical locations, online shopping or creating and sharing content, setting up businesses with little or no capital, providing services to the world from your home, the possibilities are endless.
The Internet has changed our lives by defining our day-to-day lives in ways that could not have been imagined in a decade ago. Its simplicity and its ease to use mean almost anyone can participate.
While we are doing all these, it is important to be aware that, every time we log on to the World Wide Web and carry out our activities, we leave behind digital footprints. And these footprints can be traced back to us.
The amount of information that can be found on these prints can be very little to very huge that it can lead to serious violation of people’s rights. So, what does this mean for the average citizen and their right to privacy, should they be worried?
Earlier last year (2012), Google was in the news because it changed its policies in a way that would allow the corporation store all the private information of its users and then sell it to businesses.
Google is not the only one that has been discovered to carry out these practices. Companies like Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and a host of other online business that offer free products are involved in gathering and selling consumer data for profit.
According to Jeff Chester, from the Centre for Digital Democracy, “Our privacy as citizens and users throughout the world is threatened by this powerful pervasive commercial surveillance system that is being created without our awareness and without our consent and that has nothing really to do with paying for online services.”
“Increasingly a system has been created that tracks us wherever we go, whatever we do, and sells us to the highest bidder,” he added.
The video below give more insight to how people can get into trouble for sharing some stuffs on the internet.
Below is a map related to internet privacy.
