On the surface, spam, viruses, identity theft, malware and a host of other things people expose themselves to on the Internet are a huge problem. These are all just a means to a profit for some, but the problem is not the fact that businesses profit on the Internet but how businesses profit on the Internet. At the heart of the problem are businesses and the user data they collect and rely on. Today, these new successful businesses are referred to as “Web 2.0 companies” because of all the new innovations that they are making. But it’s not the new innovations and new ways of interacting that are problematic; it is what businesses are doing behind the scenes with user data to earn their bread and butter.

Web 2.0 companies like Google are not there to serve their users. Their real clients are advertisers. Most of the successful businesses out there have discovered that personal data gathered on the web is worth something and people are willing to throw it away in exchange for access to fun social websites, mash-ups and other web 2.0 technologies. When Google was getting started and began collecting user data, they were aware of how much the data they had was worth and the potential for a public backlash against them for collecting it. Because of this, they were careful and cautious in the beginning. However, as time went on, they were more confident in their position and became more and more invasive in the collection of user data. And now, it is so bad that in many cases they even make the user’s ability to access their own data difficult. Recently, a website put out by an engineering team at Google is claiming to try and reverse that image. But are they really?

They are advocating and advertising an engineering effort to make it easier for users to move data in, as well as out of Google products, to and from competing products. The irony is that “moving data out” does not mean removing it from Google. Google still retains all data that crosses their systems. This is just more of the same effort to collect and utilize more data by encouraging users to migrate data from competing services. This is data that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

Is it acceptable for companies like Google and others to get their hands further and further into our own personal lives and track everything we do? Take Google maps for instance. How do you feel about the fact that Google maps has pictures of everyone they drive by on the street and possibly your picture without their or your knowledge? Do you think Google’s new PR website, DataLiberation.org will help you find the picture of yourself and not just download the copy but also help you remove it from Google’s clutches? No.

How can we get out of the Google trap? Sometimes it’s hard to avoid. The speed of life forces us to compromise by using some of these freely available services out of convenience. To combat this, as you find companies and services that don’t subscribe to an advertising model, promote them. Anytime you come across a web company that is actually servicing their users and customers, promote them by sharing them with others. Share them with your friends and family. Share them with strangers by blogging about them or talking about them here, or anywhere else that people are listening for change. That is what it is going to take to fix the heart of the problem.

I bet when the BBC’s television comedy series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus first came out with their 1970 “SPAM Sketch” they had no idea just how far the comedy bit would go and how popular the term “spam” would become in encapsulating all that is now unholy and relentless in the world of unsolicited, bulk electronic messaging. Today, you can almost hear those same Vikings drowning out our emails, chat room conversations and forum posts with the sound of “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam, wonderful Spam” every time you receive an unwanted advertisement about male enhancement or a ‘get rich quick’ scheme.

I still remember my first experience dealing with spam as a teenager in the late 90′s while I was in an online gaming chat room. Back then, chat room spam mostly consisted of spammers trying to interrupt legitimate conversations between users by posting the same word, phrase, or ASCII art over and over until it completely covered the screen. A couple years later, spam had already grown much more intrusive and was now geared toward advertising, chain letters and scams designed to bog down chat rooms, online forums, and email inboxes. I didn’t really take the expanding threat and annoyance of spam seriously though until one day, my mother received an angry phone call from AOL:

“What do you mean her account has been suspended? For what?! Pornography?!!”

Talk about having a lot of explaining to do – apparently, my email account (which was purchased under my mother’s name) was sending out hundreds of spam emails per day advertising porn websites. How did this happen? It turned out that one of the spam emails I received had instructed me to login to my AOL account to “verify user information” and said if I didn’t, my account would be shut down. So, like the gullible teenager I was, I clicked on the link in the spam email and was taken to a fake AOL login page that harvested my user name and password the second I tried to log in. It then used my information to log in to my real AOL account, access my email and send out spam. This seems like such an obvious scam to me today, but this is still one of the ways hackers dupe new email users and propagate spam to the point where spam now accounts for 94% of all emails sent.

The upside to my experience was that I learned a valuable lesson: spam is not to be taken lightly. So, you might think, “I only get a few spam emails in my inbox each day – so what?” Aside from the obvious irritation, spam emails can be extremely dangerous. Spam violates your privacy and security. Spam can pass along viruses and trojans that harm your computer and can harvest private data from your files. Spam is also responsible for a significant amount scams, phishing, fraud, risks to children and identity theft.

So, how do you stop spam in its tracks?

It’s quite easy actually. The first step is to become more aware of potential avenues for spam to attack. If you have a blog, forum, or a social media profile, change your account settings so all comments must be approved by you before they become publicly visible. This applies to your email as well. Avoid using any so-called “free” ad-based email accounts (like Gmail or Hotmail), and make sure your account’s spam filters and security settings are working properly. The second step is to be more aware of your Internet behavior:

• Do you regularly visit websites with a lot of pop-ups, adware, cookies and advertising?
• Do you register for free online accounts that ask you to provide a lot of detailed personal information?
• Have you ever opened an unsolicited email from a sender that you didn’t recognize?
• Do you publicly post sensitive information about yourself on social media websites, forums, chat rooms or within the content of your emails?

All of these activities can leave you at risk of attack by spammers, hackers, scammers and identity thieves.

Now, I’m not going to lecture you on your eating habits. As long as your spam stays in the kitchen and out of the Internet I say, to each their own.