Argentina made headlines last month when it was revealed that world-cup soccer star and national team head coach Diego Maradona had secured a court order to have search results for his name scrubbed, and that Yahoo! was complicit in the actions. (rest of article)

Although filtering in Argentina is a fairly rare occurrence, web-savvy Internet users there are using Tor. Argentinean Federico Heinz, a Free Software advocate, talked to me about why anonymity online is so important.
Heinz, who says he uses Tor mainly to anonymize network access to certain web sites, says it is vital for the sake of keeping anonymity for pseudonyms, and to keep certain web sites from aggregating data on one’s browsing patterns.

He expressed a common concern of polite Tor users: Because he is unable to contribute to Tor with server space, he says he uses Tor less often than he would like to. (Tor relies on users to donate bandwidth/server space to keep it running; Tor’s own web site offers an explanation on donating bandwidth).
While Tor is certainly useful for circumvention in Argentina, Heinz stresses that Tor

“is not more important in my country than anywhere else. Even in countries with exemplary governments it is not wise to disclose too much about yourself to anyone who doesn't need to know: governments, institutions, even crime are not static. Data that was disclosed in relative safety can become a concern if
the next government in turn is not as resp‎ectful, of if crime rates go up,
or any combination of a lot of unfortunate turns of events.”

Heinz also explained why he believes people should browse anonymously. He states that because the Internet has such potential as a surveillance tool, anything we do now on the Internet has the potential to be there in twenty years. Who hasn’t regretted something from their past?

The issue of surveillance is not so simple, however, as Heinz went on to say:

“There is also a deeper reason: user profiling makes "unusual" behaviour patterns stick out, and this can be used, for instance, to call this behaviour
to the attention of security forces. This, in turn, is almost certain to cause people to avoid unusual behaviour, just to keep a low profile and be left alone. But if we repress unusual behaviour, we are in fact condemning our societies to stagnation: unusual people are what drive us forward, and without them we will never be better off than we are today. Let us not forget that many of the ideas that are mainstream today (like the one that says that all people should be equal for the law, for instance) used to be very unusual [not so long ago].”