nline. Many parents have no idea what threats exist or even how the technologies in question work. Last but not least is the report to our privacy when online. These days, the most skilful manipulators of new information and communications technology to build up files on individuals are private companies collecting personal data on tens of millions of people. Simon Davies, the British head of Privacy International, a human rights watchdog group, says that every citizen of an industrialized country appears today in about 200 different data bases. Such mines of information are centralized, sifted through and correlated to produce very detailed profiles of consumers. The files are then resold to all kinds of firms, which use them to sharpen their marketing strategies, assess the economic reliability of customers and adjust to specific commercial demands. The Internet is an ideal tool for this meticulous task of categorizing the population. It is an extraordinary source of data as well as a practical way to handle such information and circulate it. To make matters worse, the Internet is a world of invisible tracks. You get the impression when you surf the Web that you leave no traces behind you. The truth is rather different. Some sites place spying devices, or "cookies", on your computer's hard drive the moment you log to them, so they can tell which pages of the site you have looked at, when you looked and for how long. A survey last year by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) showed that a quarter of the 100 most popular sites on the Web use cookies to obtain profiles of their users. When you next visit them, they can present you with advertising tailored to your interests, or even send you without your knowledge programs like Java Applets, which can reconfigure a site according to each visitor's tastes. Arguments persist that the erosion of privacy is not such a big deal; the economic benefits of information availability an...
