The modern internet is a bastion of speed and convenience. Information technologies have created internet systems with incredible data transmission capabilities. However, the comfort brought by digitalization has its consequences. To create superior tools, software, and services, tech companies abuse user privacy to benefit from our data.

For such circumstances, the greed of tech businesses is not the only factor. The ignorance of gullible and non-tech-savvy internet users plays a big role in the privacy issues on the web: a lack of interest in policies of companies that store and manage private information has led to mistreatment of data and the end of privacy on the internet.

Tech companies have plenty of ways to extract data from their clients: website visits track your IP address for localization, browsers store cookies to speed up recurring visits to frequently used pages, social media networks track your location to fuel their algorithms, other personalized ads, and content. Through all the different sources, businesses can profile their users, reconstruct entire lives and create the most addictive products and services. While results may be convenient, they often aim to maximize user engagement by any means necessary.

Today, internet users know and understand the mistreatment of private data. While it becomes hard to shake off the feeling of being watched, most of us cannot imagine our lives without modern tools, smart devices, and digitized entertainment. In this article, our goal is to shed light on privacy issues on the internet, how they affect our personal life, predictions for the future, and the tools that can help us preserve anonymity online. We will also address proxy servers, the differences between a residential server and a datacenter proxy, and which option is better for privacy and security on the web. If you want to learn more about the technical side of a data center proxy and its comparison to a residential server, check out Smartproxy – a great proxy server provider with plenty of educational material on this subject.

Location tracking in applications

Location tracking is one of the biggest concerns for internet privacy and humane technology advocates. First, we have GPS and other social networking apps that ask users to enable their location tracking to provide accurate navigation and recommendations for locations we might want to visit. As convenient as the service is, it gives incredible power to businesses that store it – they can use it to create location-based ads and even display content recommendations by evaluating the approximate users and the phones you interact with the most are viewing. When groups of people enjoy similar digital entertainment, they can share and discuss it, creating even bigger importance and dependence on these systems.

There are plenty of ways that describe how such power in the hands of tech companies can get out of hand. We can observe some of them even today. For example, police authorities ask Google to give up information on phones present at crime scenes. The rational approach that everyone is innocent until proven guilty gets thrown out the window. Due to location tracking, anyone can become a suspect, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. Without restrictions, companies that know our every move have hundreds of ways to abuse this information, ever for personal gain or in the worst-case scenario – share this information without consent to restrict our freedoms.

At least this is the power in the hands of the biggest tech companies that rarely misuse private data to endanger customers. Today, even the apps that have no business in tracking users’ locations hop on the train of data aggregation. Information is an extremely valuable resource, and modern companies extract tons of private data.

How can you preserve your privacy?

Complete anonymity on the internet is impossible. Every action on a social media network, every app we open leaves a trace of information, a digital footprint that can be connected to our identity. However, to prevent exposure to data, we can minimize transparency with the help of privacy tools. 

Every website we visit sees our IP address through an HTTP header. This way, even without location tracking, web server owners can determine the approximate location of visitors and connect other elements of data to your network identity. Mobile phones are most sensitive to tracking because companies can monitor every step through internal sensors. But if you are using an android phone, you can protect your privacy with an android proxy. Proxy servers reroute your connection through an intermediary server and mask your real IP address. This way you will not expose your network identity to recipient servers. While IP exposure is not the only element of private information, it is an essential piece of data that ties the user to their network identity. Because this part of information can be controlled, we recommend our readers add this extra layer of protection to fight back and combat the privacy issues on the web.