ASUS
Those of us who are obsessed with the idea of online privacy dream about a universal tool that will hide from everyone their identity And network activity. Today, asus this industry has built a whole industry – VPNs, anonymous browsers like Tor, anonymous search engines like DuckDuckGo, all sorts of online services that swear to anonymize any of your activity. But the features of our behavior, our daily habits can negate the effectiveness of all these tools.
You do not want people from your environment to know who you are talking to on the web, what websites you visit, what events you comment on? Then you can safely start using VPN-services. This makes sense if you want to hide your actions from ordinary people, spouses, friends, bosses. But all these funds in no way can protect you from law enforcement or an advanced cyberwar. No VPN guarantees 100% security.
As many experiments prove, people are slaves to their habits. And to hide the features of our behavior is not so simple as any specific information, name, address, social networking pages, card number or electronic wallet.
The beaten thesis “we are all different” also applies to habits. Some are still fans of the Beatles and watch their clips every day, on their way to the office. Others all the time tend to be attractive, combining the care of the child with watching make up-tips from the famous pop diva. Our habits are part of ourselves. Even if you try very hard, you can not stop loving, say, French music, for a week or a month, stop reading news in the morning or learn gossip from the life of the stars. Imagine yourself in the place of a super agent and try to completely change your habits, taste preferences, daily rituals. And you will understand how difficult this is!
Therefore, if you have the necessary resources, you can find a person hiding from his behavioral pattern. All of us are characterized by the stereotyping of thinking and a certain set of reactions and actions to simple things. This is rational. After all, it is much easier to constantly use the finished model, reacting to this or that regular event, than each time to “reinvent the wheel”. A certain set of things we used to do from month to month, from year to year. The process of patterning begins with early childhood, during the knowledge of the surrounding world and communication with other people.
Using an analysis of behavioral patterns, you can pretty much calculate any person.
Scientists at Princeton and Stanford universities conducted an experiment in which 400 volunteers were asked to provide them with an anonymous history of their search queries. As a result, scientists managed to correctly identify more than 70% of participants in the set of resources they visit.
Police structures and special services of different countries have long used behavioral patterns to search for criminals and suspects. And taking into account the development of artificial intelligence technologies, and every year more and more noticeable digital trace left by us in the network and all kinds of databases, to find you by behavioral features will be more and more, the easier. Unless, of course, you actually committed an offense. This approach can not yet be massive, given its laboriousness. But AI is what they need to do for people the most difficult part of the job.
Naturally, we have habits in online life. We visit the same sites, write comments in the same groups in social networks, read women’s or men’s blogs on average 10 minutes, or 30, if we start working later or are not burdened with family troubles. All these habits can not hide any VPN that hides our ID and IP. A person is not only an identification number and a portrait in a profile on Facebook, but a person with many unique features and features.
Many adepts of online privacy, inspired by the revelations of Edward Snowden, set themselves Tor. To date, he is recognized as one of the best browsers for private work. Created on the basis of Firefox, Tor can help to remain invisible while on the network. Your IP is not visible when you visit any sites, and you can not prove that you used them.
The browser’s symbol is a regular onion, because in its work the so-called onion routing is used: the browser gradually transmits information through 3 nodes (as we remove from the bulb layer by layer), and it is already impossible to determine which site it entered user. Disadvantages Tor – low data transfer rate and the ability of an Internet service provider to determine that you are using this particular browser, which means that you probably are hiding something about yourself. That is, using Tor, you attract attention. Therefore, be careful: upload documents or files through it, open them only when the Internet is off. If you follow links to third-party resources in these documents, you can betray yourself, and all conspiracy will go wrong. And is it worth the privacy of such troubles?
There is simply no absolute anonymity in the network. In this it is easy to see even by the fact that when searching you are offered personalized contextual advertising of those goods that you were interested in earlier. How else have they learned that you will be interested in mountain bikes, or Adidas sneakers, or drill, or expansion modules for Arduino? You yourself told about this, just using the search in your browser.
People want to protect themselves, not to allow that careless comment in the social network could interfere with a career or registration of loans. But how can you trust the program, even if brilliant, while not trusting relatives and friends? Trivial, but true: it’s best to protect your personal information by simply not posting it on the network.
As shown by a study conducted in Germany for three years, privacy for the network is more advocated by those who himself places the maximum of information about himself. Often people do not have enough live communication, or they want to give themselves more importance. Is not it wonderful to tell a million details about yourself to the whole world, and then furiously defend this information! But after all, everyone is able to protect their private lives by simply becoming a bit more reserved.
On the other hand, many people do not want to be able to learn anything about them, but if there is a high-profile crime, or even a terrorist attack, we demand from the secret services that they immediately find the perpetrators and not at all Allowed more of this to happen. But this is impossible without large-scale traffic control, without the ability to quickly access data on the personal lives of specific people, their movements, their social connections. And – about their habits.
This contradiction between the preservation of privacy and security is stirring the minds of network users around the world and causes thousands of discussions.
Is there no longer anonymity in the world? “Big Brother” watches us at every turn, and we can not do anything about it?
The owners of electronic devices are also not protected from collecting information about them. For example, British developers Pete Warden and Alastair Allan a few years ago accused Apple’s gadgets that they are watching their owners. They found in the iPad and iPhone memory the file consolidated.db with the coordinates of all those places that the device owner visited, indicating the exact time.
The first information about this appeared in the summer of 2010, therefore researchers suggest that the surveillance function for the first time Appeared on Apple devices running iOS 4. A file with information about the user’s presence can be viewed by synchronizing the smartphone or tablet with the computer: consolidated.db is copied to the hard disk. It’s amazing that this file is not encrypted in any way, so anyone who has access to your device will be able to find out about where and when you were.
Google also does not hide what information it collects about its users. But last year’s changes in the privacy policy shocked users of smartphones based on Android. The company’s documentation now includes personal information on all data about phone calls and SMS client. According to the German resource Mobilsicher.de, an Android smartphone connects to the Google server during each call. The volume and variety of data collected allows a corporation to create a detailed profile of each user.
Google assures that users of the network can trust them. Peter Fleischer, a security specialist, notes that Google’s basic principles regarding information are:
- the company does not sell it,
- they do not collect data without permission,
- they do not transmit information to advertising services without permission.
It sounds unconvincing. In addition, by accepting the terms of the agreement when installing the product or registering with the service, we do not always read the offer. And there are points about the collection and the possibility of using the data. Be attentive.
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Devices and applications for privacy, to which some resort as a panacea, can not be called completely useless, they will simply provide you with a low level of protection. And most likely, this protection will be enough for you. So do not be disappointed in VPN and other tools, you just need to soberly assess their real capabilities and be aware of the importance for your tasks. In particular, do not forget that special browsers and applications that scream loudly about what will provide you with anonymity, it’s just a reliable lock that will protect you from small scammers. But this is by no means an armored mansion with a security brigade, in which it is possible to hide secret documents or the property of an entire republic.
