A new project that has been launched on Kickstarter wants to give privacy back to the users of social networks and the internet in general. Pretty much where ever you go on the internet right now, anything you post is tracked, and often sold, to the highest bidder. This is one form of monetization of the internet.

Sean McGregor, a computer scientist at Oregon State University, is Priv.ly's creator and lead developer. Priv.ly is an open-source project and allows a user to encrypt any message they post in basically any text box on the web. How it works is that the message is sent to Priv.ly to be encrypted. Eventually, it will simply be a peer-to-peer connection.

This creates a link to the message that can only be viewed by the people that the message is intended for when encrypted. Then, instead of posting the actual message to where ever your'e posting, you post a link to the Priv.ly message instead. The only visible data is the link to Priv.ly. So, maybe I should start encrypting these news posts!