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Tuesday, October 18, 2022

The First Rule of the Internet

Free!

There is just one rule that is imperative that you understand when it comes to privacy on the internet: 

If someone is offering something to you and you don't have to pay for it, then most likely, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT.

What I mean by this is that no one does anything for free when it comes to offering free software or service on the internet. If you sign up for a service, or install free software (Open source software like Linux and other open source projects are different in most cases but READ the EULA!), and they don't charge you for it, it means that they are likely to gather information, like, name, demographics and other information about you that you may not really feel comfortable in sharing. 

Not to point fingers, but facebook is a huge collector of user information. If you have the free account that facebook gives away, then facebook has tons of information about you. You must weigh "Am I willing to give up some privacy in order to take advantage of the software? And don't forget, even though facebook is a web application it is still software. 

Don't just blindly scroll by the EULAs (End User License Agreement). Look through them and SEE what information they are collecting about you and how they will share it. 

Do they use persistent cookies (These are not deleted when you close the browser). Most are rather innocuous and just save usernames and passwords to make it easier to access, some are not so nice. Look at their EULA to see what information the collected cookies actually collect and do!

Free online quizzes, tests and the like are huge mining software that collects oodles and oodles of private information about you. Avoid them! Some writers of this type of software actually use cookies and information freely provided from you to sell to hackers who will attempt to use the information to "guess" passwords for other sites, like online banking credentials for example. Do the opposite of Nike's slogan; "Just DON'T Do It!"

READ THE EULA

What I am saying is that nothing is truly free on the internet, yes, even open source software as all writers of this free software collect information on their users. It just comes down to "How much information that you give up is worth the cost of using the free software?

READ THE EULA

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