Keeping safe on the internet

The internet is outwith control of any single group, or person. Even the police (Interpol) stuggle to find, let along control, those responsible for many websites. That means that it is litterally "fair-game" for the criminals, & legal companies, anywhere on the planet to access you whenever you go on-line.

You may believe that you are "anonymous" on-line but whenever you access the internet you are assigned an identity by the machine you go through to access it, & anyone who knows a little about how the web works can see that. They can then use it to keep tabs on you & track you down. That identity is what is called an "IP address", which is fairly easy to find out. For example:

Your IP address is: 18.218.106.24

You are using: Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com) - (browser & device details) to view this website. The browser listed is the official description, details of your device, & operating system. Very thorough, but shows how much information is available about you! It's also possible to find your location & other details.

As noted, it takes just a little more research to use your IP to find your location, then target you directly. Companies who advertise can, & often do, use this information a lot - choosing which adverts appear on your screen whenever you use the web. The biggest company who use this kind of information are the infamous "Google". (I have to be careful here so I don't get into legal trouble!)

You may be surprised how accurate the adverts, which appear so often when you do a search on the internet, will be relevant to your interests, & may well reflect what you were searching before! That is because most search-engines record every search you do on their website & use that to target their adverts, (& often sell that information on to others) making them a great deal of money from the products they advertise! There is only one search-engine which currently does not record that information, duckduckgo may have a silly name (Is Google, Yahoo or Bing any better?) but they do not "track" you or record what you search for.

However, most of us do not care about adverts, & are so used to them it's not worth caring that much about it. So it's probably best just to be careful instead of changing your habits on-line. Whenever you use these search engine websites be very careful when you get the list of results. The websites always make money by putting companies, who pay them big money, at the very top of their results. The law says they must show which names are paying for that privilege. Google mark adverts with: , but make those very hard to see.

Relax with your device

Banking & shopping on-line

The very thought appalls many older people, & younger, but is not something to be afraid of. Both can really help, especially during the lockdown when you couldn't get to the bank to pay your bills, or didn't fancy struggling home with your bags of groceries.

The most important thing to watch out for is the address of the website you are going to use. Look at the very top of this browser/app, & you will see "craigmillar.net...". That is the address of this website. At the very start of all web addresses is HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) but if the website is secure, so safe to use for spending money, it will have HTTPS instead. (The S obviously stands for secure.) That means that the website was setup using "Transport Layer Security" encryption so it is safe to use with money. This website uses encrytion although it doesn't need to! Modern "browsers" have decided to hide the first letters & show a small padlock on the left of the address instead. If it is an unlocked padlock then the website is not secure. If it is locked then the website is safe.