To be honest, the current state of internet privacy and security is a joke. A lot of websites nowadays require you to create an account, which I think is stupid. The more you think about it, the more you can see how useless online accounts are. Even with websites like Amazon, Ebay, or any other online retailer for that matter, having accounts are pointless. What would you rather do, buy everything without an online account and stay semi-anonymous, or give Amazon your personal info to make things “easier to use”. By trusting these online sites with your personal information you are creating your own security risk. I honestly think that all online retailers should have a “checkout as guest” option no matter what. Not only that, but some websites don’t even secure your password and personal info correctly. This can lead to thousands of people’s personal info being stolen, not good.
Internet security is one thing, but internet privacy is way worse currently. If you’re apart of the majority of the population and you use Windows with Chrome, as well as the Google search engine, then congrats, you’re being spied on. All three of those items I just mentioned are closed source programs that sell your personal info for money $$$. And yes, WINDOWS SPIES ON YOU, in case you were wondering. Same goes for a lot of websites on the internet like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and etc. However, you can avoid this, you can stop or mitigate the spying done on you. You can install a free/open source OS like Linux or BSD and you can find alternative search engines as well as installing a web browser that respects your privacy like Brave, Firefox, Qutebrowser, LibreWolf, or really anything besides Chrome and Edge. Only you can help stop the mass surveillance on the internet by using free and open source software.
The internet is way too bloated and slow. How many times have you visited a website and it takes forever to load? A lot a websites recently have decided that having a website that loads quickly and takes up not much space isn’t important. A lot of websites that seem like they should be simple like recipe or educational sites are littered with countless ads and useless JavaScript. I’ve actually seen websites where, it’s just plain text on a background, but for some reason, it uses like 5 paragraphs of JavaScript, JUST USE HTML! Making your website bloated takes up more internet bandwidth and wastes the users time. When you design your website, you should account for all types of people in all types of locations. Just because your website loads in 0.1 seconds with your city fiber connection, doesn’t mean that it will do the same for someone living in the country with a dial-up connection. If you want to make a website that’s actually responsive, fast, and useful, here are some things you should consider/do:
Things on the internet are censored all the time. This is not the fault of the internet, but the massive companies that basically run the internet. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, and etc. delete countless posts everyday, sometimes it’s because they posted things like gore or porn, but most of the time, it’s because they don’t agree with what you said. That goes for a lot of websites today, if you say something that isn’t “politically correct” or something that someone thinks is offensive you can get “canceled”. I think that this is extremely stupid because it does not people actually voice their opinions which is the whole point of social media. You have to right to be rude. Here is a link to a post made by Eric S. Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative, regarding his thoughts on this subject.
Believe it or not, big search engines like Google and Bing actually censor search results. Search engines like these straight up remove search results that they do agree with or don’t like. If you want a search engine that you can actually somewhat trust, use something like DuckDuckGo, Swisscows, or SearX. Don’t let anyone control what you can and can’t see.
The internet can be “fixed”, however it’s becoming more and more unfixable over time. If website creators took these 3 points to heart when making a website, the web would be a better place. There have been efforts to make this possible, protocols like Gemini have been created to make the modern web more bearable.