GHOST SURFING

Unless you happen to be a VIP, you can drop into a baker’s shop anywhere but in your own home town and pay cash for a loaf of bread without revealing your personal data. Nobody will record the way you move or attempt to discover your behavior patterns. In day-to-day life, anonymity is the rule. In contrast, the Internet allows seamless logging of visitor traffic on websites. This continuous data collection allows for unique visitor identification; all it takes to identify a user is a short phone call to your provider, who is easily identified via a whois entry, to get your personal data. Governments have passed laws to prevent the most extreme misappropriation of personal data, but Internet users with static IP addresses are still easily identified on the web through a simple whois request.