Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online, but which I really don't feel like putting into the public eye, or having related back to me. They're pretty bland, honestly, but for many of them they're not things I'd like to discuss. Hell, even recipes for pork are something I'd rather not have popping up in my strongly Jewish grandmother's news feed.

I'd imagine most people have things like this, from innocuous things that might just get them teased at the office, like an obsessive interest in historical reenactment, to embarrassing things like health problems, to even mildly illegal things like enjoying weed.

Paradoxically, at the same time, the internet is getting more private. Because everything is tied to a real world id, and people don't want to expose everything about themselves online, things are moving to private forums. Things like closed facebook groups for friends, instant messaging, etc. Personal websites that someone put up and made open to the world out of their own interest are getting harder and harder to find. Blogs seem to have killed them, and now even the blogs are dying.

And it really is getting harder to be anonymous, as far as I can tell. Most major email providers really want some sort of information that ties your identity down, like a phone number. Same with a bunch of larger social networks. Forums seem to be dying slowly, and even there, often an email tied to a real phone number is needed.

Was just saying the other day how it sucks seeing the web change. It's like when musicians complain about the music industry being over produced and too commercialized. I remember back in the 90's how excited I was just by making links underline or change color (before CSS.) Thought it was the coolest thing ever. The web used to be a place to find people who shared the same interests and I feel that is no longer the case. Everything is hyper focused on metrics; likes, re-blogs, shares, comments, etc. It's pointless.

>Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday.

Ha! I was asked to put in my email address before I could read the article. I almost didn't read it, but I put in a fake address and they let me through the gate.

They've stopped because websites designed like the washingtonpost.com have made it insufferably annoying. Most of web used to be actually interesting and useful, now it's just a constant game to compete for marketing profiles and ad views.

It helps that the web is now terrible. It used to be that when I typed in some band, movie, show, book, or piece of ephemera into Altavista, 50 sites would come up with 50 different voices commenting on it from 15 different directions. Now, 50 sites still come up, but they're all using the exact same anonymously-written copy.

Sometimes you get lucky and you can use Wikipedia to index into the Wayback Machine, and see a broken bit of the old web, hopefully with an unbroken link into another bit.

I will sometimes stop myself from googling something I'm curious about. I imagine a situation where I become falsely accused of a crime and the search I'm about to make coincidentally incriminates me and is discovered with a subpoena.

The article's premise implies that the trend is increasing - more people are worried about security online. But this isn't justified anywhere; there are no historical numbers.

I would find it more believable that people do more activities online now that actually require security, and aren't convinced it exists. This is a totally different problem than they think they are less secure than they were before. I doubt people find ecommerce and email less secure now than 10 years ago.

When net started tons of people used to say how dumb of an idea it was to use credit cards on it and post information about themselves etc.

Was interesting to watch that opinion change and now change back.

The internet really should come with a warning, anything you say or do can and will be tracked and stored and used against you in a court of law (or guantanamo)

The economic consequences of the chilling effect will have to be severe before they impress either lawmakers or internet companies. For the latter, there is too much riding on the monetisation strategies. And the race for the smartest exploitation of personal information is the new Wild West (or Gold Rush, if you will), only this time not confined by a limited amount of square mileage.

> 26 percent of internet-using American households [self-reported in US Census survey] avoided buying goods or services

The retail giant [Amazon] tallied $23 billion more in U.S. e-commerce sales in 2015 than 2014, the report found. [1]

The difference between reported behavior and actual behavior can be very large.

[1] http://s831.us/229QeKz

I think the best way to be anonymous is to practice pseudo-anonymity and try doing sensitive-looking things ad nauseum until you do the actual anonymous activities for real. Similar to drills, or dry runs. Typically you don't want to do fully fledged Silk-Road type things if you haven't practiced selling lemonade out of the boot of your car at the seaside.

What you typically want to do is know your enemy and threat model. For example, when I got my first Android phone and naively downloaded all the apps I could find, I was super reckless and done some very sensitive things on the phone, and only when I plugged it into Wireshark and realized any number of beacons and analytics scripts running in the background did I stop using it entirely. I now vet all my apps before using them, and if possible, create my own ones where I know exactly what each line of code is doing and why.

In terms of threat modelling, I think things like TOR are sufficient enough to blackout the NSA as long as you're using it correctly and know of all the attacks (previous and current) which are used against TOR. What always annoys me is that people don't include the NSA in their threat model and make up stupid excuses not to use TOR, thereby downgrading the security of others and making the Internet a breeding ground for more spying.

I know TOR is not a silver bullet though, and there are many strategies to compliment TOR like compartmentalization. For example, separating work from play, using disposable email addresses, having no centralized e-mail account for ever single thing you do (a big problem that still hasn't been solved yet). And just general OS hardening. Using OSX over Windows, using disposable VMs (Think Qubes), and paying attention to the last mile of The Internet usually holds us in pretty good stead. Using crypto for everything, and locking shit down with 2FA are two other strategies entirely missing from vast swathes of Netizens too.

Why are credit card fraud and identity theft so feared? Most often (always?), the bank/credit card company assumes the risk. The worst that will happen is you lose 1h of your time calling them.

My biggest problem with the internet today (like other people in this thread apparently) is that it's becoming quite hard to stay anonymous and having things tied to me is a risk I, most often than not, am not willing to take.

+- 120.000 people is hardly representative of 320 million people... Is it?

Bullshit.

People might be saying it, but it's obviously not true.

Commerce is continuing to rise.

Social media is continuing to spread across different mediums.

Old people who were afraid or couldn't use the net are dying and new young people are coming into the fold.

People are now more aware of privacy and security because they are using all the things so much.

One change is paywalls.