Protecting Your Personal Information

By Joel Craig, NEWS 9 Correspondent

Protecting your personal information is always a concern online. Here are some things you may not have thought much about.

Yahoo collects personal information when you register; use Yahoo services, when you visit Yahoo pages or the pages of certain partners.   When you registered they asked for information such as your name, email address, birth date, gender, ZIP code, occupation, and personal interests.  Once registered when you sign-in you are not anonymous to them.  They even record information from your computer including your IP address, your computer's software and hardware properties along with the page you requested. 

Google does pretty much the same thing and may combine the information you submit with information from other Google services or third party services to be able to know more about you.  They say this is in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of their services.  Google also scans its users' emails for keywords which they then use to match ads with what their scanning program believes you may be interested in seeing.

There's also something to know about Facebook.  Canadian privacy officials pressed Facebook claiming nearly 1 million third-party developers worldwide have had virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users' personal information.  Also saying the website breaches Canada's privacy law by keeping a user's personal information indefinitely - even after some members close their accounts.

Many other services and social groups do similar things as the ones I've mentioned.  I know it's tedious to actually read those agreements and privacy notices that pop-up instead of just clicking "accept."  But if you don't - you don't know what's happening to your personal information.  The internet isn't really "free."  Companies are making billions of dollars dealing in the lucrative marketing world of information about you.