Orwell was wrong, it is 2010, not 1984
Here we go again. More on Big Brother. The US government announced in June that US government agencies may track traffic and online behavior so that they can better provide information and services for the people who visit their websites.
The stated purpose here is two-fold. First, the Obama administration wants the government’s websites to be easier to navigate, and to become useful. Secondly, it wants to monitor your behavior on its websites to figure out what information was accessed the most and hence, potentially the most useful.
Privacy issues are crucial to the topic of government tracking and targeting, so much so that the government memorandum the Obama administration issued discusses it in the introduction. The government is assuring people that they shouldn’t be concerned about the US government watching their every online move.
“Any such uses must not compromise or invade personal privacy,”states the document “It is important to provide clear, firm, and unambiguous protection against any uses that would compromise or invade personal privacy.
I’m sorry, but given how well the government does most things, do we really think they will get this right? I’m not assuming ill intent or malice on anyone’s part. I just assume that this is an area that we really don’t want them to get wrong. If they do, and if the data is breached, this could be a privacy nightmare.
This is yet another reason why using an anonymous proxy is a good idea. With a proxy, your identifying information, your IP address, is masked so that your specific information can’t be tracked. However, even with an anonymous proxy, if you fill in information on a government website, they then know who you are. An anonymous proxy can’t help you if you provide your personal data willingly.
