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It is an extreme simplification that you don’t need to use software online to protect your data unless you’ve got something to hide. I’m not sure which Internet they are using but it’s not the same one as me! I think this opinion is more a matter of not knowing the risks than thinking they don’t exist. The simple fact that there is a huge information war going on all around us and the information generally being targeted is ours, that’s why I use anonymous software.

So who is exactly after our data ?

Well here’s some examples from a very long list.

Search Engines, want to build up profiles to target their searches, and their advertising.

Companies compare and target profiles of specific users.

Democratic Governments – to catch criminals, terrorists and monitor their population looking for’baddies’.

The Less democratic governments – track and imprison political dissidents, quell any opposition.

Identity thieves, our information is gold to them, why risk your liberty stealing from someone in the real life, when you can wipe out their bank accounts from Cyberspace.

These are black and white statements but of course there are a myriad of real life examples which lie somewhere in between. Remember though there are many, many people incarcerated at the moment who have ’said the wrong thing’ online. Just as there are huge crime rings spreading from Eastern Europe to South America which specialise in Cyber crime.

No one knows exactly how much is stolen online every year. Any guesses would be inevitably be innaccurate but experts agree the figures would be truly frightening. The sophistication of the criminal gangs grows each and every year, they have huge technical resources at their disposal.

You will see it at every level, take for instance your average spam or phishing email – have you noticed how these have changed? Not so long ago they were very obvious fakes. Nowadays even the most savvy user may have to look twice before spotting a fake. The advances in this area have often been exceeded in other areas.

Take for example using proxy servers online for various reasons. People often use them to bypass fitering, surf anonymously or to access content in a country which is blocked or maybe like BBC or Hulu. Identity thieves will frequently ‘release’ such proxies in order to target these people. The proxy server you will contain a huge log of all your data on that server. Every web site you visit and all your data is left in the logs of the proxies, they can even intercept Secure SSL traffic with a few little techniques. Doesn’t take long to amass some details, some account names, passwords – maybe access to your online bank accounts.

There are many reasons why you should protect your data, everyone should learn about the dangers.