Though the Net was born of individualism and initiative, these values are unwelcome to profiteers and politicians who want online activity to become controlled and commercial. We urge everyone to recognize and resist anyone trying to strip-mine cyberspace. Rumors, online paranoia and constantly changing technology all contribute to emotionally charged arguments as the medium develops. Efforts to ensure privacy in the virtual world have produced a host of software and hardware responses. Fingerprint computer pads, retinal eye scanners, encryption known as PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy, and online browser certificates are in various stages of development.
Some basic issues form the heart of the overall privacy debate.
Regardless of the Pentium III's on-off option, some information about your computer is already being broadcast when you explore the Net. If you use an Ethernet card on a local or remote network, an address for that card is used to route traffic to your machine. On another front, the Internet protocol, or IP, address from which you are accessing the Internet is also available. The IP address is a 32-bit number that identifies each sender or receiver of information. When you request an HTML page on the Web or send e-mail, your IP address is included in the message.