What Dangers Lurk Beneath?
My rather Conservative upbringing probably plays a large part in my recent introduction to the dark Web. Today I was busy doing, what I discovered shortly after @steem.engine 's post reached me, exactly the same thing at almost the same time – analyzing the Tags or categories everyone uses for their posts. I came up with 20,784 in the sample of data I used. A great number would not have pleased my mother, should they have been brought up at the dinner table in polite discussion.
Reddit uses a similar strategy but instead of displaying a short list, presents them all and then segregates them into SFW (Safe for Work … or my late mother) and NSFW (Don't Share these F#@2r%i&g6n Words – or as Steemit says Not Safe For Work).
That having been said, this is just the thin skin found on the outermost layer of the onion. Beneath the 5% to 20% accessible to Google, is the deep Web, a large collection hidden from the search engines, but mostly legitimate.
Inside that is the dark Web. “A world of encrypted content inhabited by hackers, criminals and terrorists”[1]
Here's some pretty scary statistics from that article concerning this dark Web:
2.5 million daily visitors to the dark web.
57% of the dark web occupied by illegal content, child porn, drugs, terrorist communications, and counterfeit currency.
Estimated number of Web pages: 30,000 – 40,000.
$1.2 Billion dollars in total sales (of illicit drugs) by the Silk Road in the two years before it was shut down.
$7.00 The price for a stolen Visa or Mastercard
[1] “The man Who Lit the Dark Web” Charles Graeber, Oct 2016