Non-Personal Identifying Information

In the modern world, reliance upon the internet and computers is exponentially increasing. But at the same time, the averages person’s likely hood of having malicious actions directed at him/her on the internet is on the rise. Tracking a person’s movement over the web is constantly being refined over the years in an attempt to combat the defenses users are developing/using to protect their personal information and privacy. For example, two of the ways a person can be identified over the web is by obtaining Personal Identifying Information (PII) or non-Personal Identifying Information. PPI is defined as any information that can be used to discover the identity of the user such as age or his/her physical address. Non-Personal Identifying Information …show more content…
The skew of the data might be attributed to the college generation being more tech-savvy then the older generations and therefore more aloof as they grew up with the internet always being with them. In fact, to test this I expanded the audience of my survey to include the older generations and apathy became a less common response, quickly being replaced with surprise and concern that companies would do something like this. Some of the older generations’ responses were surprising in that they went out of their way to determine what the companies were up to after they discovered the companies were using their personal data in unscrupulous ways. In regards to companies selling one’s web browsing habits for profit, the survey takers were mostly apathetic with a few who were appalled that companies are constantly intruding upon their privacy. Also those who took my survey seemed to have mixed feelings over the privacy of cloud data storage services. Some feel that it is safe but most feel that it is not worth the risk since you do not know who has access to your data or the security measures that the company uses to protect your data, if they do at all. To quote a response, “Any cloud storage can be …show more content…
These findings are intriguing because the majority of users are in either one of two camps: appalled or apathetic. It is very rare to find someone who is naive enough to wholeheartedly trust the companies and/or random people on the internet. This is an interesting because before I looked at my survey results, I believed that most people did not know about the dangers the internet poses to an individual’s privacy. But as I went through my collected data, I found that most of my survey takers were at the very least apathetic about the intrusion to their privacy the internet possess, if not angry or worried. This may be because those that took my survey were all college aged people who grew up with the web. When I expanded my survey to those five or ten years older than the original survey group, I found users who were naïve but they did not stay clueless for long. After discovering that web based companies were collecting and selling their data, some members of the older generations mentioned that they would look into how the companies are conducting their data collection to see if there is a way to counter it. Overall it seems