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With the advent of Google requiring that you sign up for an email account to utilize services that used to be available without an email account, it brought to mind an experience I had and how fragile our identity is on the web. How many times have you come across a site where you have to sign up for an account even if the only thing you are doing is browsing? AND, when you go to sign up for this account, you find that you are required to put in your real name, address, phone number, sometimes credit card information, and work information. You also read that if you do not put in your real information even on sites where you are not using a credit card, you may run into trouble (read something like this on one site recently, don't remember which one it was, though).
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One site in particular I remember where I had this experience is a popular movie site. Since my VCR was finally on its last leg, I wanted to replace all of those VCR tapes with DVDs or movie files and thought purchasing & downloading from the web would be an easy way to do it. I started to research this popular site, but the only way I could see if they had the movies I wanted to purchase was to create an account. I did so. Since the use of this site required credit card information up front, I proceeded to put it in as I thought I would be using it. I created a username, billing info, password, etc. Once the account was created, what do I see...my complete billing name on the top of every page I visited at this site and could not find my chosen username anywhere in my account anymore or a place to create a username. To make matters worse, when I searched their catalog of movies & DVD's, they did not offer anywhere on their site any of the movies I was interested in owning (I guess my tastes are premium). Since I was not interested in keeping this account anymore I attempted to delete my credit card information and was not permitted to. Immediately I closed out this account and then the site informed me they were going to keep my information for another two years. I had this account approximately one hour, never purchased anything or utilized any of their services. All I did was browse.
You hear or read all over the place to protect your privacy (security software news, radio, TV news) & don't give out your real information because of malware, crimeware, screenscrapers & a host of other deviants and yet everywhere you go on the web it seems you are asked to create an account even if you are just browsing. Yes, there are workarounds to this some of the time, but when a site requires credit card information when you sign in, sometimes there is not a workaround as in my real-life example above. How are you supposed to protect yourself when the websites you utilize are exposing some of your private information and leaving you without a way to browse or shop anonymously?
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My solutions to this have been to
.........................(1) immediately leave websites that require a sign up just to browse
.........................(2) not to purchase from any website that requires credit card information before you even have a chance to explore their site in detail.
.........................(3) use a fake name, if permitted, at a site I am interested in signing in to as long as (1) and (2) are not involved. If I cannot use a fake name, I leave the site.
........................(4) use VPN software (not the free versions), which, in the version I use, also gives a way to browse a site anonymously. Funny thing about the VPN software I purchased is that it doesn't usually show up when you do a VPN search. I happened to catch a glimpse of the name in an article and remembered its unusual name (could not find the article again after I closed out the web page). It shows up all over the place, though, when you search for it by name and Norton Internet Security says it is safe and secure. Excellent software, though. You are not tied down to a yearly subscription unless you want it...you can subscribe monthly, semi-annually or annually.
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Do I lose the use of some of the popular sites of the day because of my choices? Yes I do, but to me it is worth the security I feel when I am not playing into the oxymoron of the web. In the future, though, I do not think there will be any workarounds to secure our privacy. We will more than likely all have a singular signon username that has all of our information attached to it and will be tracked all over the place including sites you may not want anyone to keep an ongoing record of for any length of time. Hopefully, the powers-that-be and security experts will have found a way to protect our identity when signing on, while surfing the web, and give us a way to opt out of sharing our personal information with sites we feel uncomfortable with having that information.
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This article "Oxymoron of the Web" is an opinion that was completely authored by©PonGoad 2012. All Rights Reserved based on personal experiences when surfing the web and reading articles on the future of the internet.
