Ever wonder why the banner ads you see in your email happen to feature a product that you just purchased from your favorite online retailer? Or a highlight appears for a hotel deal to that quaint European city that you and your friend were just chatting about over instant message? These advertisements are no coincidence, and most email users want them stopped.

Many well known email programs scan your personal online conversations searching for information that allows them to sell to you, the unassuming user. According to the online study, “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising,” performed by the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law, and the Annenberg Public Policy Center, 66 percent of Internet users do not want marketers to send them tailored advertisements. Furthermore, when these users are informed that their personal content is being repurposed, in order to create these tailored advertisements, the results show that between 73 and 86 percent do not want such advertising.

As much of the Internet is being powered by advertising dollars, this problem is rampant. Such targeted invasions of privacy are not only beginning to catch the attention of email users, but the policy makers in Washington as well. The Tennessean reports that U.S. Representative Richard Boucher, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, is drafting legislation that will require websites to prominently disclose what information they gather on visitors as well as obtain user approval before collecting data to share with other advertising companies.

Even if Congress enacts such laws, online tracking of consumers will continue in some form or another, particularly by retailers, as highlighted in a recent USA Today article. So let’s start the discussion:

How do you feel about advertisers and retailers taking your personal information and creating tailored email advertising?

PrivacyHarbor.com private email does not mine or sell your information; we’re in the privacy business, not the advertising business. Feel free to contact us to learn more about this subject and the steps PrivacyHarbor.com takes provide you with secure email and to ensure your absolute privacy.

Have you ever been walking down the street with a friend, talking loudly about an amusing personal story and then right as you got to the juiciest part you passed by a stranger on the street who happened to hear the whole thing? You probably didn’t think much of it since you didn’t know the person. But, what if later that day you went to a job interview and that same stranger who overheard your juicy conversation ended up interviewing you for the position? Talk about an embarrassing situation!

While this situation seems highly unlikely in a person’s day to day routine, this happens to people every day on the Internet. Juicy gossip and embarrassing stories about you, your friends and your family can get spread publicly across social media forums, profiles and message boards in plain view of employers, bosses, co-workers and other professionals. Ever wonder if the information you publicly posted about yourself might have cost you a new job or promotion?

There are no passing conversations on the Internet. Anything publicly posted about you will stay online, often in posterity for all of time – that’s why protecting your private information online is so important.

Some web users are under the misconception that the Internet offers the same privacy and protection as the “real world,” when in fact there are very few laws regulating one’s rights to online privacy. A recent article from the Japan Times by Bruce Schneier called, “Offhand but on Record” covers the top privacy concerns with today’s popular social media websites and the advertising partners that support them. Schneier calls for “comprehensive data privacy laws, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed,” but stricter laws alone will not save users who continue to publicly post sensitive information.

Privacy education is the key. If you are going to use social media websites and blogging tools like Facebook, Twitter or WordPress, be aware of the content you publicly post and make sure you set your privacy settings to block sensitive information from public view. When using job boards and career networking websites like Jobdango or LinkedIn, make sure that your resume and profile are up-to-date and don’t contain errors, typos, or other information that could disqualify you from your future job or promotion.

There is a useful article on the, “10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know” that can provide social media users with additional tips to protect their privacy online while still utilizing social media websites.

As Internet technologies continue to expand the mining and sharing of information, online privacy will continue to be a growing concern. The best way to maintain your privacy online is to use social media and networking sites with caution and to spread the word about privacy concerns with other professionals online.

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.

When people communicate, they want to believe that what they say or write is private. People take precautions every day to make sure information is shared only with the intended recipients.

Consider the example of people having a conversation in public. When you want to say something personal you will probably look around, lean in and either speak quietly. Sometimes you will hold your thought until you get to a more private location. You don’t want other people to know what you are saying.

The same should be true on the Internet. Most people don’t care if others know that they are going to go to a movie later that night. However, people often share personal financial, medical or legal information over the Internet.   They believe that these Internet conversations are private.  The reality is that much of the Internet is set up to gather your information to sell, spam or scam you. Recent estimates reported spam accounting for more than 90% of all email received.  What do you do to protect yourself? One way is to carefully understand the privacy policies of the websites you visit and see who owns your content. You will be surprised to find that in most cases you do not own what you write; often you don’t even own the content of your own emails.

While most companies don’t hire people to personally read your email, they do build computers to scan the content and sell that information to advertisers. These advertisements are specifically trying to exploit your personal information. Unfortunately, this often leads to serious issues such as spam and identity theft.

If a privacy policy is confusing it is often written that way by design. Many sites claim they don’t share their content with anyone, however between themselves and their subsidiaries, your information can spread over the Internet very quickly.

In addition to reviewing a privacy policy, a good way to tell that the company will exploit your privacy is by looking at their business model. If they have advertising on their site, advertising partners, or subsidiaries that have advertising, that is a telltale sign that they will in some way make money from your personal information.

You are the only person who controls what information you want to share. If you don’t want the world to know your legal, financial and medical history, be sure to carefully read the privacy policies and understand the true business model of the websites you visit.

We are excited to implement all the great suggestions from customers and visitors that we have received over the past year.  Some of the major differences that you will notice are the slide show and videos, a news scroll and of course our blog that you are reading now.

I’d like to take just a moment to describe a few of these new features. The first one is the slide show. Many people have asked us to tell them a little more about who we are and what the difference is between private email and common email. The slide show will explain that and much more.

Contained in the same area as our slide show is our video section. We will have weekly In The Know videos telling you about what is happening at PrivacyHarbor.com, as well as other topical videos that you see listed.  We will be updating these videos often, so check back and see what we’ve added. If you’ve created a video that you would like us to know about, just send a link to info@privacyharbor.com with your contact information and we’ll contact you if we add it to our video section.

Finally, we have this blog. We’ll share information about PrivacyHarbor.com, as well as privacy news that is most pertinent to private communications over the Internet. This section is built to be informative and interactive, that’s why we have it on our homepage. Please write to our blog to chat, ask about PrivacyHarbor.com or any privacy news that you come across. We look forward to hearing from you.

We are passionate about privacy and believe that your email communications should be private. Sign up for an account and tell your friends about us, so they too can take back their privacy with PrivacyHarbor.com.

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