There are moral and ethical issues
concerning online privacy. Make no mistake about it: in this new digital era, we
live in a state of constant surveillance. There are hundreds of advertising
and tracking companies that follow everything we do online. The articles we
read, the videos we watch, the sites we visit, and the social comments we make
are all being tracked and analyzed. For this reason, nearly every person with a
computer should be thinking about how to protect his or her sensitive
information.
Times Have Changed
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| Online Privacy |
In the early days of the Internet, users
could hide under fake names or nicknames. Most people didn’t enter their actual
location because there were “creepy people” out there in cyberspace that you
were “supposed to hide from.” Along came Facebook, which wasn’t interested in
your nickname. Instead, it wanted your real name and birthdate. Twitter soon
followed suit. Google has shared
pretty much everything you’ve ever told one of its services with the rest
of the Google product family. If you add cookies, IP addresses, tracking
share buttons, and location-based sharing to the mix, it’s a wonder “creepy
people” haven’t found you yet.
With
the current stage of the digital realm, you can’t tweet about your life, check
in, write a controversial blog, or run a web business and still expect privacy.
You can only hope to contain it. However, someone is eventually going to Google
you, and Google is eventually going to help tie all the information together.
You have to prepare for and make peace with your digital life being “out there”
and understand that you might have to deal with the possible consequences of
someone finding it.
Privacy in the digital age means a
lot of things to a lot of people. Some people fret about the privacy controls
on social networks, some worry about the companies that track their online
behavior, and others are concerned about government surveillance. But, the
private and/or public discussion to date has focused almost exclusively on
privacy and worry. New technologies that cause disruption have often led to
collective concern about privacy.
Privacy and the Emergence of “Big Data”
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| Always Watching You |
One
of these new privacy-disruptive technologies is Big Data. With companies competing
to acquire and analyze data at an astonishing pace, this new world of data
collection is able to help build insights into Internet-user behavior. This
deep analysis mines even the most personal information associated with user
actions. Big Data can assemble this information into an intimate picture of the
people it relies on for raw data.
Google searches, Facebook posts,
YouTube videos, Pinterest posts, and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior in fine detail - sometimes even as it happens. Big Data is how Target's Guest Relations Analytics accidentally
revealed a teenaged girl was pregnant to her father. The store's data
collectors used information about her purchasing habits to predict her
pregnancy - even though she did not explicitly reveal the information to Target
or to her parents. With this newly mined data, Target sent her a pamphlet about
upcoming parenthood. This pointed information revealed the undisclosed
pregnancy to her shocked and uninformed parents.
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| Big Data Infographic |
Because of cases like this, it
would be naive to think targeted ads aren't already happening and not to
expect continued increases in targeted advertising. These sites will turn to
their valuable data to boost revenue. The price of storing and analyzing data
is also dropping exponentially and keeping that data hidden is a hopeless
task. With advertisers demanding more targeted ads, the mining of personal data
to pinpoint consumer desires is quickly becoming more rampant.
This online data can be combined
with offline data like our voting record, employment history, and marriage
licenses to build an extremely detailed profile. Companies like Facebook
already scan
the contents of photos and private messages for Homeland Security “risk
words” like “infection,” “body scanner,” or “hacker” and turn them over to
law enforcement. Even if you delete your embarrassing Facebook posts, companies
like Social Intelligence sell the past 7
years of your posts. The wireless companies you pay for mobile service turn
over 1.3
million customer records to law enforcement each year - which include texts
and your phone’s GPS location.
Steps to Protect Online Privacy
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| Online Data Privacy |
Although it may seem daunting, there are steps
that can be taken to minimize the depletion of your online privacy. A few
of these steps include enabling private browsing, creating
a “clean” email as well as a separate “spam” email address, examining the
privacy policy of sites you agree to use, and managing what personal
information you’re posting online. For most users, these are extra steps are viewed as unnecessary. However, if you’re interested in maintaining some
semblance of privacy online, these steps are necessary. Otherwise, it would be
prudent to realize that most of what you do online can – in many ways – be
considered to be publicly accessible information.
Embrace and Adapt to the Changes
The dirty secret of the Web is that
the "free" content and services which consumers enjoy come with a
hidden price - revealing consumers own private data. Online advertising constantly fights against
anonymity and pseudonymity. Advertisers are continuously trying to learn everything
about web users, to unmask them, and peel away layers of demographic info,
interests, and behaviors. For the most part, we've adjusted to this shift in
the new technology era. The sooner we realize we are better off learning to
manage our privacy than fight against the lack of it, the sooner we can get
back to enjoying the internet. There will always be emerging changes. As we
have in the past, we will continue to adjust and adapt.
For more information on Online Privacy check out the links
below:
Podcast: The
Privacy Blog Podcast – Ep.7: Blacklisted SSL Certificates, Social Media
Hacking, and the “Right to be Forgotten” Online
Video: Will we
care about online privacy in 20 years?
Video: Find and
Fix Holes in Your Online Privacy - Tekzilla Daily Tip
Infographic: Facebook,
Google and the death of online privacy -
References:
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