Understanding there’s no Anonymity in the Technological Age

“Don’t think for a second that cleaning out your browser cookies, hoisting that firewall, and installing identity theft software makes a dent in protecting your privacy in the new digital world.

Every time we activate our cell phone, swipe a credit card, or use EZ-Pass to sail through toll booths, we leave a record of our whereabouts and clues to our behavior for others to tap that never even existed 20 years ago. All that Web browsing you do on your Android or iPhone device, all the weather updates you may get via that connected GPS unit—these things not only tell someone somewhere what data matters to you but also reveal where you accessed it. As the Web moves off the desktop and into every niche of the physical world, with it goes all of the privacy concerns that still aren’t resolved online. Clean out those Firefox cookies if you like, but Web privacy is only the beginning. At the same time the privacy front evolves, experts in the field are also rethinking the ramifications of these mountains of data. In the future, they warn, governments and corporations may be able to violate your privacy without even having to identify who you are.

‘It has grown by orders of magnitude since the birth of the Internet and our use of cell phones,’ says Stephen Baker, BusinessWeek journalist and author of a new book on digital data gatherers, ‘The Numerati.’ From email replacing letters to downloading music from iTunes instead of purchasing CDs, our habits, tastes, and movements now are recorded in ways that can be connected…”

source: computerpoweruser.com