Every one can remember the old days of online advertisements when you would have all sorts of ads pop up on your screen that had absolutely nothing to do with you, your interests, or your life. Consider the sports enthusiast; if while surfing his fantasy football account, making some tweaks here and there, he encounters an ad for the latest new miracle grow for your garden. Likely this ad will simply be getting in the way of him and the screen, so away it goes. Advertisers wised up though, and they can’t make any money unless you buy their stuff, so they have to sell better.

Thus came the advent of the behavioral advertising. These advertisers are a bit more invasive than the previous pop-up ads, which were just annoying. These systems actually scan your browsing history without your consent or knowledge and determine your likes and dislikes based on them.

It works like this; let’s use the fantasy football user again. The program will sift through his browsing history, and upon seeing many sites related to sports (perhaps ESPN and its affiliates) will determine those would be the best things to throw at him. Gone are the gardening and baby doll ads, and here are the new custom football gear ads, meet a player ads, etc. This man is much more likely to click on these than he is to order ten bundles of miracle-gro garden solution.

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Keeping everyone’s information safe, secure, and confidential is a tough task to do. Think about it; securing every little piece of data that goes through a public network, and then having to share it with only certain privileged individuals while still barring others. Then this must be done for each user. This is a lot of work, but this is why ISPs are paid major bucks and many people use privacy software on top of that. While adults seem to be pretty safe, it seems as though hackers prey on children’s information. The information is usually public, published by schools, parents, etc. and easy to access.

A school in Illinois was having a big problem with kids skipping class and being truant, and the teachers weren’t cracking down on it. The only punishment these kids would receive is a possible phone call to parents, but if the parents didn’t answer, the teachers didn’t even bother to leave a voicemail. Since the school gets a little bonus money if they have kids coming to school on a consistent basis, and since public schools are always tight on money, they decided to do something about this blatant insubordination. The school board and teacher’s assistants decided to post daily sections in the newspapers about kids who skipped class. This would embarrass them and make the public keep an eye on them and get them to go back to school.

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In the public’s minds, the word censorship and China are almost synonymous. They have even garnered every privacy concerned individual’s favorite Internet meme: “The Great Firewall Of China”. China has always been concerned with any organization that doesn’t follow the philosophy of their communist party, or just any foreign organization period. The problem for them is, they can’t control these groups, so they just shut them down.

A new player has stepped up to the plate, and the government is more concerned than ever; mafia based video games. The Chinese authoritarian government has since released a statement via the Ministry of Culture that has banned video games that have any mafia ties or relations. Games like “The Godfather”, and any other games on the Internet that glorify organized crime have all been blacklisted, and “severe punishments” have been put in place, although no one specifically knows what the sanctions are yet.

The government says these games glorify all sorts of anti-social and misanthropic behavior like killing, stealing, and raping. They say that young kids will gain access un-rightfully to these games and excessive playing will distort their perception of right and wrong, and could breed them into homicidal lunatics.

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The Internet is made up of many sites that allow people to voice their opinions. For example, many news sites have a section where you can leave a comment about the page or respond to someone else’s comment. YouTube is also one where you can leave comments, but unfortunately these usually start online riots and “flame wars”. MySpace is also another good example, as your comments can be seen by anyone and can be about anything you want them to be.

Another important part of the Internet is being anonymous. This is important and necessary because people can be tracked over the Internet very easily. Criminals can find someone’s IP address and use to it to track a person’s activities around the Internet, and possibly even their location in real life. Your computer has an IP address hooked up to it that acts as a virtual nametag, and this is how trackers and identity thieves find you and steal from you. This IP address is completely public, and some people ask why.

There is a new controversy brewing on the Internet though, pertaining to comments: being anonymous. Some people believe it is unfair that some sites require you to post a name and an actual e-mail address, while others simply let you opt out and choose to be anonymous.

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