I am starting to get a little ticked off at how much data is being collected on me when I surf the internet. Websites often ask for authentication data including name and birth date, which they match to an IP address and can get a geographic location. For websites that I deem do not need that information, I always give them an alias, fake birthday and I use a throw-away free email address.However, through various means, many companies collect browsing data, referrers and all sorts of meta-data, browser information etc. that can be used to pinpoint you. I say that it is time to stop the madness. It is time for us software geeks to take back the internet. I don't want to have to use a proxy server to browse the internet. I say that it is time for a new privacy plug-in for the browsers.
This privacy browser, first of all, would effectively filter out the ads as efficiently as the old incarnations of Firefox did. But it would do much more.
It would deny all http calls to third party sites not in the visiting domain. It would filter out third party cookie information. It would filter out browser information. It would prevent the reading of browsing history. It would deny any app from reading my email address or my contacts. It would not send any data to any domain not in the visiting domain.
Certainly it is not in the best interest for any organized company to write this browser filter, so it would have to come from the community of programmers who are concerned about online privacy. It is certainly time to take this privacy issue into our own hands.
