There was a time, in the not-too distant past, when the Internet was mostly about sharing educational information.
Sadly, the Internet is now full of companies who want to use it as a vehicle for advertising and who are obsessed with building up a dossier on as many people as possible, to exploit for financial gain. Your privacy means nothing to these companies; they will collect as much information about you as possible, with no regard for your wishes.
I take active countermeasures against these hostiles. I browse with javascript disabled. I don't have flash installed. I don't accept cookies blindly. I adjust my user agent. I run my own DNS server and cache and have hundreds of sites blackholed, including facebook, google analytics, and all the major ad servers.
It's some trouble to set all this up, and inconvenient at times. But unfortunately it's a jungle out there, and the default setup of browsers leaves you like a naked person in a mosquito-infested swamp.
It is clear when you're on a browser that your search terms and text inputs go to a server somewhere. And RMS has plenty of warnings about such things as Google Instant, Facebook "likes" and other sneaky ways websites spy on you.
But at least up until now you could stay away from that stuff by just not opening a browser, and you knew to be careful when you did. Now there is no line, just "be careful what you type on a computer, period. You don't know who's watching". And that's a lot worse. What if your private journal on your hard drive is mined for targeted advertising? No, keep the web and my desktop separate, that's the point.
Does anyone remember Patrick Norton on The ScreenSavers on TechTV in the 00s complaining about websites keeping access logs? Heck we even complained about cookies back then. The sick thing about the privacy trap is that they slow-cook you to the point where _not_ snooping on users becomes something akin to a business risk.
What exactly do you mean by 'monitored'? Of course sites you visit on the internet know you visited them, just like shops you visit IRL know you visited them. But it's not anyone is actually monitoring you or any other user personally. The worst that happens is some algorithms change your ads.
As an engineer, I'm amazed. As a person who doesn't want the person on the other end of every website I visit to know who exactly I am, I feel violated. At this point though, all I feel I can do as a hapless consumer is to desensitize myself to said violation.
I use a VPN, Pi-Hole, Ghostery and Firefox. All of these a relatively recent additions though, so if a website can get my email and that links to an already existing database of all my collected data up to that point, I'm buggered anyway.
I operate on the principle that the Web was invented for publishing information to the world, so I don't publish anything (blog posts, comments, etc.) that I don't want available to the world. Hence I'm fine for bots to scrape it, copy it, aggregate it, whatever (as long as it's not plagiarised, but that's a different discussion ;) ).
Spyware monitoring my browsing habits, down to the real-time location of my mouse pointer, is not something I want to be exfiltrated from my computer and correlated into a political or commercial profile.
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