With blogging becoming such a popular and widely utilized pastime, people are beginning to see the security issues it represents. First of all, there is the possibility of someone tracking the blogger from his or her page, and maybe even posing as a friend (which isn’t hard to do online) to arrange a real life encounter. There is also the simple possibly that the blogger is just putting too much information out there. While they may talk about other things, blogs are often centered around friends and their activities together. Oftentimes you will see a blog that lucidly describes the place they are discussing, (sometimes even an address…) people involved in the event, and usually a picture attached of the person and their friends. This is everything and more than a criminal needs to find this person and rob, kidnap, or steal from them.

This new awareness of blog safety brought about the anonymous movement. People realized that the root of their problems and the biggest danger in their blogging lives is that they were being tracked and identified in real life. These blogs are often public too; imagine if a boss or potential employer were to view someone’s blog and turn them away from the job! The reverse of this happened a little while ago; a woman who constantly blogged about her disdain for a local politician and his methods was anonymous online. After some time and after having built a strong fan base, she decided to go public, and posted her name, a brief bio, and a picture of herself. Her boss, being an avid supporter of the ousted politician, fired her and forbid her from coming back to her job. She is now blacklisted from many employers in her area, for fear of being guilty by association.

Use an anonymous proxy to stay anonymous online. This is the best and most powerful way to do so. High bit encryption services will protect your identity, and a changed IP address will ensure you safe and anonymous browsing; and the avoidance of any identity-based privacy issues.

People post to much stuff on the Internet, and it never deletes itself. Although sites rarely ever clean out their servers, even if they did, you can guarantee your information is already posted to another site. And you can be sure from there that somebody stored it on their computer and emailed it to a bunch of their friends and co-workers; a vicious cycle. Suddenly your embarrassing photo or online rant about something has made you the laughing stock of your community and future employers will hold this over your head. Employers now often do a quick Google search of their applicant’s names, to see if they have a social networking site account. Colleges do this also; they want to make sure they are hiring some complete slacker who has all sorts of incriminating stuff on his page.

Whether this information is collected or used against you is completely involuntary too. It is one thing to share a picture because they put it there. It is another thing to involve someone in a video or picture without their consent, or post personal things about them like address or telephone number.

Governments and third party advertising organizations pretty much have an absolute ruling over these kinds of data. A government can use and access anybody’s data for pretty much any excuse they have, and do so often. Although almost all of the time it is to catch or a crook or bad guy, this is still a little disturbing. We really need to step up privacy laws in the U.S. and also around the world. People in some less than democratic countries have the worst times with this kind of stuff: government censorship, Internet police, and other ridiculous practices.

If the laws won’t change, (and they usually don’t for a long, long, time) then something has got to help our situation out.  For one, try using an anonymous proxy.  Also, encryption services will encrypt all of your data so that no one would be able to hack in and steal any sensitive information. Take your privacy into your own hands, (the legal way) get an anonymous proxy now.