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Day 24 - May 24 - Which web holds your data?

  • Elizabeth Rasnick
  • May 24, 2023
  • 2 min read

This is not a trick question. There are three different areas of the web on the internet and your data may be in one or more of them. These areas are the surface web (also known as the open web), the deep web, and the dark web. The term “the web” that is thrown around in everyday conversation typically refers to the surface web. This is where most of your browsers and search engines live. Public-facing organization websites are also located here. When you google something and get a list of results, everything you are doing is on the surface web. Any site you access by typing in the address or url directly is on the open web. All of these websites are only 4% of web content.

Ninety percent of the content of the web is located in the deep web. Let’s start with an easy example for the deep web. Most of us access financial information from a bank, credit union, or other financial institute’s website. When you go to the financial website you are on a public-facing web page. This is on the surface web. Once you go to the log-in page, you are at an interface between the unsecured, public site and the secured, private site. You log-in and you’ve moved to the deep web, the secured, institute’s pages with your account information on them. If your information were on a website that could be reached by directly typing the address or using a link, that would mean your account information would be on the open web. That would not be good. From this example it should be easy for you to think of other web pages that are on the deep web. There are all your medical records, tax documents, school transcripts, auto records, travel documents, and so on. Examples you may not have thought of are subscription sites. I’m a researcher and subscribe to sites that, with my credentials, allow me to access research papers and data that are not accessible without them. These files are on the deep web also.



The dark web, where so much criminal activity takes place is 6% of web content. This is where internet black markets exist. The dark web houses online drug rings, human trafficking networks, and trade in illegal goods and services among other criminal enterprises. This is where criminals go to buy an innocent person’s private information. The Silk Road was an internet blackmarket that popped up in 2011 and was shut down in 2013. It has since been replaced by others. These markets are accessed via mechanisms like the TOR (the onion router) network. This technique helps users become anonymous, in essence, by routing traffic through layers and layers of volunteer networked devices. Cryptocurrency is another tool used in the dark web to help users keep their anonymity. Because of how these accounts are set up, it is often very difficult to track them to a specific person.

The percentages I have mentioned do shift a little from year to year, but they are relatively stable.




 
 
 

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