One of the most important principles of individual privacy is the ability to act anonymously. When people are driving to a store or reading a book at home, they have a reasonable assumption that nobody is monitoring their behavior and attaching it to their name and address.
We've been hearing plenty about how nothing is private anymore, how we're so exposed by on-line activity. Well, this post by Auren Hoffman actually gives some pointers on how to restore on-line privacy. What once was lost can occasionally be found, even for something as elusive as anonymity. However, it takes time and some effort. But anything that took awhile to do will usually take awhile to reverse.
The best part was about removing browser cookies. We've all heard about that over and over, at least I have, but if you don't accept ANY browser cookies, a lot of sites won't load right. That is more my concern than no longer receiving advertising targeted to what are supposed to be my interests. The bad cookies are the ones that contain so much identifying information that there are very few people that could be matched to that cookie other than you.
There is a section titled "What Anonymity Means" which explains what you can do to protect yourself. Go read that because I can't explain it as well as the article did.
There are also three suggestions for online marketing and advertising companies that could be changed, so that the consumer would have more privacy, yet the website would still be able to function and offer things for sale to the people that want those things. These could be part of a consumer advocacy for online privacy agenda if one were to try to take action oneself and bring about change in a sensible, plausible way that might actually succeed!
