It’s an irony that while the internet was the first place you could create avatars and split personalities to impersonate others, it has now turned into a free for all buffet for private data. I previously shared on how the ads you see on facebook were inherently tied to the Google searches you perform, and how ad companies have probably gathered so much data on you that they can find out if you’re pregnant before even you do.
With that in mind, many people still have an antiquated concept of a fully private and anonymous internet, in fact in most cases its easier to track an internet connection than an actual physical person, and its actually quite possible that a confiscated computer from your home could prove your whereabouts for the last 2 years. Earlier this year, a 19 year old girl was strangled to death while she was asleep, her alleged killers were actual stupid enough to perform an internet search on “chemicals to passout a person,” “making people faint,” “ways to kill people in their sleep,” “how to suffocate someone” and “how to poison someone”. Needless to say, the evidence seems rock solid, and these dumb criminals would go behind bars.
On the other hand, some criminals aren’t so stupid. In fact, the FBI, Interpol and various other law enforcement agencies have entire departments looking and searching for online criminals who do everything from fake money Nigerian scams to trafficking child pornography on the internet. These guys have proven quite difficult to track because of something called TOR.