On your home computer do you think it is OK to monitor what other people are looking at on the net?

Question

No I don't mean hack into other people over the internet I mean monitor what people are looking at when they are using my computer!

Answer 1

If it is officially MY computer and they are only asking to use it then I monitor them, I usually delete the log files afterwards though. If its a shared computer then I wouldn't monitor the other people, only my account on it, so then i would know if anyone's been using my account.

Answer 2

I don't think so 'cause you have to have privacy

Answer 3

If you are talking about parents monitoring children , yes , it's not only totally appropriate but necessary, in the same way children aren't allowed to go to hard-core adult novelty shops or rent NC-17 videos, there are some things that children are genuinely better off not being exposed to.

As far as the government is concerned, its not ok, but everything everyone types here or on the internet in general can and sometimes is being captured by their respective internet service providers and held for inquiry at a later time.

The repeated announcement and suppression of programs such as Carnivore and Total Information Awareness make the United States considerably unfree in this important respect. The boundaries of censorship in our country are pretty wide, but they are there.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/0013...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information...

Terrorists, Pedophiles, and other highly undesirable groups are all watched extensively from an electronic perspective. The average citizen is not in a position to know how much / or little information is being collected about them, so from the citizens perspective, it is best to assume the cameras are always on and you are always being monitored. This is not what the founders intended.

Furthermore, when you start buying and selling stuff using credit-cards there is a vast amount of information being collected and cross-referenced, such that every citizen has a consumer profile which stores most of your historical purchases, your patterns of where you shop etc. When you combine this with the patterns of other people, you can create "models" of what people are like. And these models or profiles are highly accurate.

They are even predictive. So if you start along a purchasing pattern X, if you are consistent in this profile, they can say certain things about what you probably will and will not do in the future.

A good book on the subject Supercrunchers by Ian Ayres

http://islandia.law.yale.edu/ayres/

In one respect this is totally spooky and in another it's totally cool, George Orwell was wrong, we don't need to watch out for Big Brother so much as lots of overly enthusiastic Little Brothers all over the place.

To do some of this yourself you can check out a couple of websites.

http://www.metaspy.com/info.metac.spy/me...

Additionally Google used to provide another service called Zeitgeist which was a more "high level" version of this, giving a broad idea of what many people were searching.

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends#

Answer 4

I don't understand 100% what you're asking. Are you saying monitoring other people on the net? Like hacking and seeing what they do on their own computer? (yes it's possible)

If that's your question then absolutely not.

Answer 5

In a situation where there is a shared computer, it is probably best to set the ground rules and to make sure all of the users are aware of them.  I think a parent should definitely let their children know that they may check on the child's internet history.  Between adults, different rules may apply.  Usually you can have separate log-ins and if you use these, it's not really very likely that you will "accidentally" find out what the other users have been up to.  But, if the rule is agreed upon, you shouldn't have any issues, unless you break the rule.

Answer 6

i would. it's my computer; you have to follow my rules.