There
has been a recent rise in paranoia over who is watching you online following
Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA)
monitoring people’s phone calls. Apparently the NSA
was able to monitor the phone calls of 35 world leaders. If they can hack into world leaders’
phone calls, you are pretty much assured they can hack into anyone’s personal
information. So should some regular guy working at convenience store worry
about someone watching his Google searches on how to pick up girls or is it
only the “important” people that should be scared.
The whole idea of someone
being able to follow your online activity and collecting your data just makes
the idea using phones and the internet a bit less comfortable. Especially now
in an age where most of our lives revolve around the internet, looking through
someone’s browser history can reveal some information some wouldn't want shared
with the world. (Spare a thought for the poor Muslim radicalisers who had their online porn habits spied on.)
Apparently some websites
are able to track your online activity and use the information for advertising purposes or financing other sites. Mozilla
came up with its Lightbeam tool that lets users of the Firefox
browser keep track of who is watching their browsing habits. It enables users to
see third party companies that monitor their online activates in order to
target them with advertising and presents the information as a real time graph.
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| Lightbeam for Firefox |
Quite a number of
companies have jumped on board in creating techs that attempt to guide your
privacy. Geeksphone recently revealed a new
phone dubbed the Blackphone. The phone is said to enable users to make
encrypted calls and texts as well as anonymously browse the web. The phone is
aimed at “people from all works of life who are concerned with privacy. It can
be normal users from the street, or politicians or whatever,” said Javier
Aguero, the company’s CEO.
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| Blackphone |
Boeing, is also in the
works of making a phone targeted at government agencies that offers encryption and
will self-destruct if tampered with. It will however only be available to
certain organisations only.
But despite all these
developments to people’s privacy, will you ever be truly safe and have your
privacy online. Well, apparently that will never happen. The makers of the
Blackphone admit that their device is not NSA-proof and whatever you do with
your browser will always be tracked.
I guess that’s just
downside of technology.
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