Should we Really worry about Anonymous Surfing?
Should we be worried about the lack of privacy on the internet? How do you feel, knowing that your movements online are monitored and controlled by outside parties? These issues are important ones, and will help decide the future of the world wide web.
Take for instance the practice of geotargeting, you have probably come across this term online. 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 is customising what you see and hear when you are online, we are taking the globally accessible content on the internet 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. For instance, Youtube and Facebook are blocked in many areas. Take Turkey for instance, because of a few videos posted on the video sharing site about Kemal Ataturk, then the whole site got blocked from 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. There are of course many other examples of this, China are well known for censoring their content, but did you know that Australia have an extensive list of websites that are blocked.
Anonymous Internet surfing is partly about protecting your data from the hackers and identity thieves, but it's also important for protecting our liberty and freedom of speech online!