Give me your IP and I tell you who you are! by Barbora Misakova

Technology as still increasing industry has bigger and bigger popularity. But every coin has two sides. On one hand there is a fact that internet and computers save our time and let us do things quicker and better. On the other hand there is endless problem with our privacy and safety of the dates we have in our computers. The European Union seems they want to solve it. What actually that IP is? IP or Internet Protocol is an address used by certain electronic devices which should identify them and enable them to communicate with other computers which are using computer network. In other words IP is a string of numbers by which can be our computer identified on the Internet. Browsers such as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. or Microsoft Corp. and many others should keep some privacy policy and so comply with EU privacy laws. While Peter Scharr, Germany's data protection commissioner, thinks IP has to be regarded as personal data, Google Inc. doesn't agree. Google claims that by IP address only location of a computer can be identified, but not individual user. Google also says that they collect IP addresses to provide better services to their customers and they can't do it properly if they don't know which part of the world these customers are from. Microsoft Corp. does not use IP address in the way Google Inc. does; their policy strategy uses logging into the Passport network. This whole situation makes me a bit crazy because people want to use internet connection, want to browse on the net and search for some information but they don't want to count with possibility that someone else will find out some little information about them. They are afraid of IPs but they have no problems with registering on sites as MySpace or FaceBook and writing there about themselves, sometimes very private data such as date of birth, description of their job or even photographs. The truth is that this topic will be problematic until someone comes out with some new and good solution. Hope someone like that comes soon.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080121/ap_on_hi_te/eu_online_privacy;_ylt=AjYdEQr7U.LMcZ8dyqgXETWs0NUE

by Barbora Misakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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