Privacy in the modern era--Does it matter?

from Time.com

Inside is a collection of links and articles related to the issue of privacy in the Internet/cell phone age. Please look them over to prepare for our discussion on George Orwell's novel 1984.  

The main ideas of our discussion will be that Orwell couldn't foresee (because he wasn't a time traveler or a witch), (1) how quickly technology would advance to make both government and corporate data collection virtually automatic, (2) how much privacy people would voluntarily give up, and (3) world's biggest data miners and processors would be corporations

And the major question about all of this is "Does it Matter?"  Does it matter if the government and corporations have the power to gather and analyze data about us? Why should we care if we are not doing anything wrong?

Internet and Phone Tracking 101

How do I know if I’m being tracked online?

If you’re on the Internet or you have a cell phone, you are being tracked and analyzed. Websites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Buzzfeed, College Humor, Dictionary.com, SparkNotes . . .  (pretty much every website you visit) make 90-95% of their money from advertising.  To advertise better, they want to know more about you.  To do that, they track everything we do on the Internet.

How do they track us? The most common way is through using something called a "tracking cookie." It sounds silly, I know. A "cookie" is a small piece of computer code that is placed inside your browser's memory every time you go to a site (on a computer or tablet or on a phone, too).

A tracking cookie looks something like this:

That's it. That little sequence of symbols and numbers allows the webpage (msn.com in this case) to follow me around the web. MSN can then keep track of every link I click on (they call that a "clickstream"). There are other tracking tricks that use "flash beacons" and other techno sounding things, but for simplicity, we can just call them all "tracking cookies."Here’s an example using a computer web browser.  Using an addon called “Ghostery" it's possible to see and block attempts to track me.  If I go to the Dictionary.com website with Ghostery enabled, I can see that 11 ad networks and data gathering sites are going to be tracking my movements after I leave Dictionary.com. Or at least they would be if I didn't have Ghostery and a few other things installed.  

To read more on Internet tracking, click past the break: