Freedom Down

Do we Need to think about Anonymous Surfing ?

Should we be worried about the lack of privacy on the internet?  Does it bother you that what you can do or see online is increasingly controlled by outside parties?  These are increasingly important issues and in some ways will decide the future of what we know as the world wide web.

Take for instance the practice of geotargeting, you have probably come across this term online.  It refers to the practice of web sites determining what content you can see depending on what country you are based in.  For instance, people trying to access the majority of media content on teh 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.  The social networking sites, YouTube and facebook for instance are blocked in many countries.  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.   Of course tehre are many more examples of this - China are well known for censoring the internet content to their citizens but did you know that Australia have also an extensive blacklist of sites that get blocked.

Anonymous 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!