Is the lack of privacy on the internet something we should be concerned with? Does it bother you that what you can do or see online is increasingly controlled by outside parties? They are very important issues and will increasingly define what we do online in the future.

Take for instance the practice of geotargeting, you have probably come across this term online. It refers to the practice of customising your content depending on your IP address. For instance, people trying to access the majority of media content on the BBC Iplayer will be blocked if there IP is not registered to the UK, similarly users outside the USA will have no joy connecting to Pandora or Hulu. Your IP address is customising what you see and hear when you are online, we are taking the globally accessible content on the internet and once again segregating people.

Mostly this geotargeting is done because of licenses, although censorship by countries and governments is increasingly happening. Facebook and Youtube are examples of websites that are blocked by many countries. Take Turkey for instance, because of a few videos posted on the video sharing site about Kemal Ataturk, then the whole site got blocked from mainland Turkey.

These sites are meant to be about wide opinions, people posting different views and experiences, but this heavy handed censorship is controlling what people hear, say and do on the internet. Of course there are many more examples of this – China are well known for censoring the internet content to their citizens but did you know that Australia have also an extensive blacklist of sites that get blocked.

Anonymous Internet surfing is partly about protecting your data from the hackers and identity thieves, but it’s also important for protecting our liberty and freedom of speech online!