Privacy
How safe is your info? More than Hollywood would lead you to believe. But you should still take precautions.
~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2002-03-11 |
Basics
One implication that people don't understand is deleting files. There is a myth that deleted files are never truly gone. This is an exaggeration at best. When you delete a file (empty the trash), the computer doesn't actually sweep the data from the hard drive, it marks that files space as "available" to be overwritten. As you write more files, or update files, it will likely reuse that available space, and the old file will be gone.
In normal use, overwriting can be a very quick process. Assuming you use your computer, you are surfing the Internet, getting email, writing things and doing work or saving files, all of which takes space; and the computer will recover and use that marked space, often first. You can buy un-delete or recover tools, and if you've ever used them you would know that they are very unreliable and the information you care about can get stomped on pretty quickly. Hard-drives seem to have a Murphy's law algorithm built in, so they stomp your important files first. So do not expect that there's any sort of indefinite history of what you've done.
When you do massive deletes and clean-ups of many or larger files, all at the same time, then it can take a while before you get around to reusing all that space you just cleared up. But it will happen, and usually you can't "recover" files for very long, and what you recover is often only a piece of the original since fragments are likely to be overwritten. If you really care about privacy, you can buy programs to "scrub" disks and make sure that deleted files are gone, instead of waiting until they get scrubbed naturally. Personally, I care more about the data that isn't deleted than about the data that is.
Another implication was about being able to track you on-line. If you aren't leaving your real name places, then it is not nearly as easy to know whose doing what as many imply.
Each time you connect to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) you are usually given an address (called an IP address). A few businesses and fewer homes are assigned permanent addresses. But the most common way to setup addresses (DHCP) allows address changes each time you connect, and all users with an ISP usually share a pool of them. So many are sharing, and yours changes each time you connect, so it is not at all easy for anyone to tie who you are with an address. The most common way an outsider can track who was where is to subpoena the ISP and do a reverse lookup of who (what house) was using that address, at that time, but they still wouldn't know who in the house was doing it.
| 🗒️ Note: |
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| Social Media broke the anonymity a lot. (After this article was originally written). As you're logged in there, and they can track your habits, friends, interests, and so on, a lot more is known about you. If you're not on the same browser, or logged in, they can tell a lot less about you. |
There are a few other technologies (cookies mostly), used mostly by advertising for banners, that can do a little more to share information, and track people over multiple sites. Usually, you were an anonymous number to them. And you still are if you use "New Private Window" or something like that in your browser (and don't log in to any account). But the companies care more about tracking your usage and what you've seen so they can display ads more relevant to your interests and can get paid, not in really knowing who you are. Since only a fraction of sites use the same service, you may have multiple computers or people using the same computer, they don't even have a good idea about any of it.
I'm not trying to say there are no privacy issues with computers or the Internet; there are many, but most of it is exaggeration. And while we should be concerned and aware, there are many myths about how easy it is to get information, what that information is used for, or how it is done.
👁️ See also
- Hack, Crack or Phreak - What are Hackers, Crackers and Phreaks? A little first-person explanations of how it started. (No longer current).
- Hacking - It is not that hard to hack into a network/machine, but far harder than the movies make it seem.
- Cracking - Cracking is the black art of removing copy protection from other people's programs.
- Phreaking - Phreaking is when hackers broke the phone companies security, to get access to control the phones.
- Easter Eggs - What are easter eggs (hidden software features), and where do they come from?
- Firewalls - A firewall (in real life or software) is something that protects one area from another to keep a fire from spreading.
- How Secure are you? - How secure are your devices from intruders? The answer is "it depends", on a lot of variables.
- Passwords - Annoying password requirements are combatting human laziness, with moronic bureaucacy, often making it worse.
- Privacy - How safe is your info? More than Hollywood would lead you to believe. But you should still take precautions.
- Online Shopping - Shopping and Physical Security: One of the areas that people are very concerned about security is on-line shopping.
- Virus, Worms, Trojans - Virus, Worms and Trojans, some various hacker terms/attacks explained (simply).
🔗 More
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