If you really want, you can find anyone



    Those of us who are obsessed with the idea of ​​online privacy, dream of a universal tool that will hide from all their identity and network activity. Today, a whole industry is built on this desire - VPNs, browsers like Tor, anonymous search engines like DuckDuckGo, various online services that swear that they anonymize any of your activities. But the features of our behavior, our daily habits can negate the effectiveness of all these tools.

    You do not want people from your surroundings to know with whom you communicate online, which sites you visit, which events you comment on? Then you can safely begin to use VPN-services. It makes sense if you want to hide your actions from ordinary citizens, spouses, friends, and the boss. But all of these tools in no way can protect you from law enforcement or advanced cybervore. No VPN yet guarantees 100% security.

    As numerous experiments prove, people are slaves to their habits. And to hide the features of our behavior is not as simple as any specific information, name, address, social networking pages, card number or e-wallet.

    Beaten thesis "we are all different" applies to habits. Some are still a fan of the Beatles and watch their clips every day on their way to the office. Others always strive to be attractive, combining child care with watching make up tips from famous pop divas. Our habits are part of ourselves. Even if you try hard, you can’t stop loving, say, French music for a week or a month, stop reading news in the mornings or learn gossip from the lives of stars. Imagine yourself in the place of a super agent and try to completely change your habits, taste preferences, daily rituals. And understand how difficult it is!

    Therefore, if you have the necessary resources, you can find a hiding person by his behavioral pattern. All of us are characterized by stereotyping of thinking and a certain set of reactions and actions on simple things. It is rational. After all, it is much easier to constantly use the finished model, reacting to a particular regular event, than to “reinvent the wheel” every time. And we used to do a certain set of things from month to month, from year to year. The process of forming patterns begins in early childhood, while learning about the world and communicating with other people.
    Using the analysis of behavioral patterns can be enough to calculate any person. In this case, not only to identify, but also to have the opportunity to influence it.

    Scientists at Princeton and Stanford University conducted an experiment, in which 400 volunteers were asked to provide them with an anonymized history of their search queries. As a result, scientists were able to correctly identify more than 70% of the participants according to the set of resources they visited.

    Police structures and special services of different countries have long used behavioral patterns to search for criminals and suspects. And taking into account the development of artificial intelligence technologies, and every year more and more noticeable digital trace left by us in the network and all kinds of databases, finding the behavioral features will be the farther, the easier. Unless of course, you really committed an offense. This approach can not yet be massive, given its complexity. But after all, AI is needed to do the most difficult part of the work for people.

    Naturally, we have habits in online life. We visit the same sites, write comments in the same groups on social networks, read women's or men's blogs for an average of 10 minutes, or 30, if we start working later or are not burdened with family worries. All these habits can not hide a single VPN, which hides our ID and IP. A person is not only an identification number and portrait in a Facebook profile, but a personality with many unique features and characteristics.

    Many adherents of online privacy, inspired by the revelations of Edward Snowden, set themselves Tor. Today it is recognized as one of the best browsers for private work. Created on the basis of Firefox, Tor can help to remain imperceptible while on the web. Your IP is not visible when entering any sites, and it is impossible to prove that you used them.

    The symbol of the browser is an ordinary bow, because the so-called onion routing is used in its work: the browser gradually transmits information through 3 nodes (as we remove layer by layer from the onion), and it is already impossible to determine which site the user visited. The disadvantages of Tor are the low data transfer rate and the ability of the Internet provider to determine that you are using this particular browser, which means that you are probably hiding something about yourself. That is, using Tor, you attract attention to yourself. Therefore, be careful: upload documents or files through it, open them only when the Internet is turned off. If you follow the links to third-party resources in these documents, you can impersonate, and all the conspiracy goes down the drain. And is it worth the privacy of such troubles?

    There is simply no absolute anonymity on the net. It is easy to be convinced of this even by the fact that when searching you are offered a personalized contextual advertising of those products that you were interested in earlier. How else would they know that you would be interested in mountain bikes, or Adidas sneakers, or a drill, or extension modules for the Arduino? You yourself have told about it, just using the search in your browser.

    People want to protect themselves, to prevent the careless comment on the social network to interfere with their careers or credit processing. But how can you trust the program, even if it is ingenious, while not trusting your relatives and friends? Trite, but true: it’s best to protect your personal information by simply not posting it on the network.

    As demonstrated by a study, held in Germany for three years, for privacy in the network are more advocated by those who themselves place the maximum information to themselves. Often people lack live communication, or they want to give themselves more value. Isn't it wonderful to tell a million details about the whole world to yourself, and then fiercely protect this information! But after all, everyone is able to protect their privacy, just becoming a little more restrained.

    On the other hand, many do not want to be able to at least know anything about them, but when a loud crime or even a terrorist act should occur, as we demand from the special services, they instantly find the perpetrators and do not allow this to happen anymore. But this is impossible without large-scale traffic control, without the ability to quickly access data about the personal life of specific people, their movements, their social connections. And - about their habits.



    This contradiction between preserving privacy and ensuring security excites the minds of network users around the world and causes thousands of discussions.

    Is there no longer anonymity in the world? "Big Brother" watching us at every step, and we can not do anything about it?

    Owners of electronic devices are also not protected from collecting information about them. For example, British developers Pete Warden and Alastair Allan a few years ago accused Apple gadgets of keeping an eye on their owners. They found in the iPad and iPhone memory a file consolidated.db with the coordinates of all those places that the owner of the device visited, with an indication of the exact time.

    The first information about this appeared in the summer of 2010, so researchers assume that the snooping function first appeared on Apple devices running iOS 4. The file with information about the user's location can be viewed by synchronizing the smartphone or tablet with the computer: consolidated.db while copying to hard disk. It is amazing that this file is not encrypted, so anyone who has access to your device will be able to find out where and when you were.

    Google also does not hide what information it collects about its users. But last year’s privacy policy changes shocked Android smartphone users. In the company's documentation, personal information now means all information about phone calls and SMS of a client. According to the information of the German resource Mobilsicher.de, the Android-based smartphone connects to the Google server during each call. The volume and variety of data collected allows a corporation to create a detailed profile for each user.

    Google assures that netizens can trust them. Peter Fleisher, a security company, notes that the basic principles of Google for information are:

    • the company does not sell it,
    • they do not collect data without permission,
    • they do not transmit information to advertising services without permission.

    It sounds unconvincing. Moreover, by accepting the terms of the agreement when installing a product or registering with the service, we do not always read the offer. And there are items on the collection and the possibility of using data. Be careful.

    * * *

    Devices and applications for privacy, which some resort to as a panacea, can not be called completely useless, they just provide you with a low level of protection. And most likely, this protection will be quite enough for you. So you should not be disappointed in VPN and other tools, you just need to soberly assess their real capabilities and realize the importance of it for your tasks. In particular, do not forget that special browsers and applications that shout loudly that will provide you with anonymity, this is just a safe lock that will protect you from petty fraudsters. But this is by no means an armored mansion with a security brigade, in which you can hide secret documents or the property of the whole republic.

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