Violation of Privacy and Tracking
Before you is the second part of the materials on the threats we will face in this course. This paragraph will discuss privacy violations and tracking - the so-called user tracking.
Violation of Privacy
Many users confuse privacy and anonymity, believing that they are the same or closely related concepts. In reality, anonymity is the ability to visit websites and perform any active actions on web resources, such as leaving messages, without the possibility of linking your actions to your real identity or your point of access to the network. Privacy, on the other hand, is the absence of access to information by individuals for whom that information is not intended.
For example, you are communicating in a messenger with your interlocutor, and Agent John is monitoring this. If he tries to establish the identities of the interlocutors - this is de-anonymization, he is infringing on your anonymity. However, if he reads your correspondence - this is already a violation of your privacy: he gains access to information that constitutes your secret with the interlocutor and is not intended for third parties.
The most common privacy violations include reading messages in messengers, viewing emails, and listening to phones. Unfortunately, intelligence agencies violate the privacy of ordinary network users much more often than hackers and cybercriminals.
But while intelligence agencies and law enforcement in your country violate your privacy in most cases based on rights granted by law, the intelligence agencies of another state have no right to monitor you. And they are monitoring. For example, the email service Yahoo, according to leaked information, scanned incoming emails and passed information to the US intelligence. Edward Snowden, after this scandal, urged everyone to delete their Yahoo accounts, and we join this recommendation.
By the way, it seems that hackers also read the correspondence of Yahoo email owners, having compromised three billion accounts of the email service according to recent data. The actions of Yahoo, US intelligence, and hackers represent a gross violation of user privacy.
There are also less severe privacy violations. For example, the Gmail email service was caught analyzing the content of its users' emails, based on which it generated context-related advertisements. This is permitted by the user agreement that you accept upon registration.