Many computers nowadays come with a lot of extras. In a world where every computer is lightening fast, these computer manufacturers have to have some reason to manufacture these more expensive models, and the people to shell out their hard earned money for them. Many say they have increased browsing speeds, free games, or other stuff, but the biggest draw these days is a built in “webcam.” This little device does as its name suggests, it is a camera that allows you to communicate on a face-to-face basis over the Internet. It is one thing to speak to a potential customer over the phone, but a business man who has something to sell has to show more than pictures to his or her client to convince them to buy. Through the web cam, the business man could show a customer how a product works, and see their reactions, and probably have a much better shot at making the sale.

While these web cams can be used for business related purposes as stated above, they can be purely social as well, and in this respect, they shine. People can, instead of simply typing out a smiley face emoticon, can smile and laugh and hear their friends or family’s voice. Imagine the joy a soldier feels when he is able to hear his family’s voice again; imagine the joy they all would feel if they could see each other again. Some couple are known to chat over dinner over the Internet when they are apart. An Internet program called Skype actually allows people to organize these chats with a phone number like system and chat and talk and see each other over the Internet. Many people use these to record their musical performances, their political rants, or just their random antics and upload them straight to the online video giant YouTube. The possibilities are endless; perhaps online classes will be enhanced to actually have a teacher lecture to students while they take notes.

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Identity theft is a huge problem nowadays. It really is a testament to the changing of the times; people back in the fifties would have seen identity theft and becoming someone else as a crazy science experiment gone wrong. Perhaps it is, but that doesn’t change the fact it is a risk everyone runs on the Internet today. The problem is, you put out so much confidential information every time you log onto your computer. You can be sure someone is seeing this and it is being recorded somewhere.

The next big problem is that this information is pretty much accessible to anybody. It may not be in a convenient button that says “information here” but it certainly doesn’t take an N.S.A. agent to install a deep packet inspector and steal some of your data. People travel around the Internet blissfully unaware and overall, quite unprotected. The security systems they do have were the ones installed (probably improperly) on their system when they bought it, if they even bothered to do so at all.

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Nearly every thing in life these days is password encoded. Your MySpace account, YouTube video account, Email account, Bank Account, etc. Nobody in their right minds would leave these important things containing sensitive information unsecured. This would be an identity thieves nightmare. You do in fact leave something completely unprotected each day without even realizing it; your Internet activity.

Internet activity you ask? Why is this something that needs to be secured and password protected? The truth is, hackers can intercept your transmissions from your computer and trace you right back to the source. A hacker could actually find your house through these signals, and then you’d have more than data insecurity to worry about. Imagine if your child was using the Internet and a hacker traced them back to your house! Also, these hackers can place tracking cookies on your computer and track you all around the Internet.

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Cookies are little deposits of data a website puts on your computer every time you visit their site. These log where you went on the site, where you spent the most, what you looked at, and other things to pertaining to your site activity. They also save user preferences on log-in and password based sites, and even data from your word documents and other offline transactions.

Why do they do all of this? Well, for one they do save your user preferences, so maybe you can stay logged in until you sign out of some particular sites, and they can help bring you towards parts of the site you enjoyed. This is generally helpful, but these cookies can also be dangerous too.

Recently, a controversy has been brewing over the use of cookies. Some people go shopping on the Internet, looking for better deals by cutting out the middle man or what have you, and they do so looking for good deals. Recently, some sites have been using cookies and identifying which users have money and which ones don’t, and marketing their information and wares that way. This way, if a wealthy man had cookies on his computer of him buying off of an expensive car site, the merchandise he saw on the front page of a buying website would be different (and probably more expensive) than what others see.

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Do you remember the days when you would get random advertisements on your computer that had absolutely nothing to do with what you like? Those days are long. The Internet took a page out of television’s book. First, they began to place appropriate ads on appropriate sites, just like T.V. Consider a sports channel; likely there will be many ads about football and baseball tickets, and little about the new Cabbage Patch kids doll. The Internet then became the same way. On a guitar chat website, one would see guitar cables, amplifiers, and guitars rather than miracle-grow garden solution. They have stepped it up once again, but this time not everyone is happy.

Enter behavioral advertising. This new form of ads actually investigates your browsing history and other documents on your computer to form a keyword profile of what you like and are interested in, and then brings ads to you based on those investigations, and this is all involuntary. Privacy advocates are having fits over this, and the public are scared that their sensitive information will be compromised, and it won’t have even been their faults.

“Is it worth it” is their slogan, and they say that it isn’t worth having someone’s entire computer scanned just for more ads to be thrown at them. It also is involuntary, often an entire ISP (Internet Service Provider) signs up all of their customers for a portion of what the advertisers make. It is all about the money. That’s what these advertisers think; these tailor made ads will lure people into spending their hard earned money.

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When one is at work, the Internet can be quite a useful place. You can research up and coming products, view videos and tutorials on how t use them, and even keep a watchful eye on the competition so they don’t get a leg-up on you.  This would be a great reality, but the truth is, it isn’t like this.

The Internet, for all of its greatness, can be a very distracting place. While many workers use it for productive reasons, some just lollygag all day on it, and create a large loss of productivity among their company. It is for these workers sake that the Internet at work is usually highly restricted and censored. The same goes for school; if a paid worker is slacking off, imagine the apathy an unpaid student involuntarily put in a boring class feels!

This is why many sites are blocked while you are trying to surf them. Every worker has had some downtime, and bored, they try and log onto YouTube and gotten the “this site has been blocked” message. The company IT department usually is the one who arranges and sets up all of these blocks. They do so by finding keywords that they wish to block, and anything with them usually is. “Games”, “Videos”, “Fun”, and “Social” are some stock examples of what they block.

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