Here are twelve essential points that everybody should know about privacy on the Internet. Keep these basic privacy concepts and practices in mind and you will be better able to guard your privacy and reduce intrusions into your life.
- There is no such thing as 100% privacy on the Internet.
You can take steps to lessen the intrusions into your privacy but there is no way to guarantee that nothing can be learned about you and your affairs. Learn to live with this reality and act accordingly. - Like it or not, you have to trust somebody.
Anything you do on the Internet has to go through numerous intermediaries, routers, networks, etc. Ultimately, you have to trust the security of your ISP and other services that you use. VPNs and proxy servers can increase your security but they are not foolproof. - Privacy comes at the cost of convenience.
The more measures to increase privacy that you use, the more cumbersome using the Internet becomes. Locked doors are harder to use than open ones. The correct trade-off between privacy measures and convenience depends on how you use the Internet. If you like to live dangerously, you may need a lot of privacy measures. If you are a casual web surfer and send harmless emails, not so much. Choose the level of privacy appropriate to your Internet usage.
