Internet privacy

There are a number of ways to discuss privacy. Among them are privacy as a social value, privacy as a democratic value, privacy as a human right, and privacy as data protection. All of these have further specific implications in relation to the internet or online environment. Internet or online privacy is not only about concealment, but also about personal autonomy and the power to determine the intimacy levels of relationships as mediated by the internet.

Background

From the earliest development of the internet, many observers recognized its potential to profoundly impact society. Advocates have championed its ability to enhance communication, sharing of information, trade, and much more. However, critics have long raised concerns about potential negative effects of the internet, both direct and indirect, in just as many areas. Issues of privacy have consistently been one of the most debated aspects of the online environment.

Online social networks enable the sharing of text, images, sound files, and video files instantly. Because most cell phones are equipped to create some, if not all, of these types of files, no “live” moment is spared the potential for broadcast online. While the motivations for sharing these files are often well-intentioned, the potentially negative and harmful consequences are often given little thought.

The mobility of inter-networked multimedia means that phenomena previously called “private,” such as family photography, now have a public dimension once shared on social media. Facial-recognition technology, global positioning systems (GPS), and personal information disclosure (i.e., demographics) enables “re-identification,” whereby sets of data without personal information (legal name, address, birth date) can be connected to data with clear identifiers through common attributes. Information revealed via social media leaves users vulnerable to risks such as stalking, state surveillance and targeting, identity theft and related forms of fraud, employer surveillance, and harassment by unwanted solicitors.

The predominant business model for social media cashes in on personal information that is collected and then often sold to marketers. In the early days of social media, very few users took advantage of privacy options, although awareness campaigns and lobbying efforts of organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have improved the situation somewhat. Also, public pressure on services such as Facebook has made them revamp the privacy section of users’ profiles. Often social media sites discourage the use of heightened privacy settings by putting the word "recommended" beside lower privacy settings.

Overview

Governments and technologists have begun to address privacy concerns in the online world. Some browsers include a “do not track” feature that reduce a user’s data trails, although these are by no means foolproof. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a report in December 2010 recommending a new regulatory framework for consumer privacy, which would include a “do not track” mechanism to allow internet users to opt out of behavioral advertising entirely. Subsequently, a number of bills were introduced in Congress to restrict user tracking by websites and advertisers, by Democrats and Republicans alike, some of which incorporated the FTC's recommendations. As of the end of the 2010s, however, those recommendations had not been implemented, and no related legislation had made it to a vote. In 2022, commentators did note that a version of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act first introduced that year, which would enact some of the strictest regulations on internet data collection proposed so far, including on targeted advertising, had seemed to garner a large amount of promising bipartisan support by the late summer. Canada passed its Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) in 2000, although some have criticized it for dealing with online privacy as a trade issue rather than as a rights issue. Many consider privacy an essential feature of democracy to maintain individual autonomy and lament its erosion in a networked environment.

Another online privacy issue that has emerged is the live-streaming of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras. The British-based website Internet Eyes, for example, was designed as a node where policing, business, and the public at large could intersect. Users watching CCTV would be paid for alerting police and businesses to crimes such as shoplifting and burglaries. What services such as this have lacked has been consideration for the privacy of the majority of people not committing crimes, although their proponents contend such services reduce crime and associated risks. In addition, some technologists have hacked into CCTV networks and streamed their cameras online for entertainment purposes. Other technologies, such as forward-looking infrared cameras, have also allowed state agencies to circumvent traditional barriers, such as search warrants, to access private spaces.

The awareness of social media practices can have an inhibitory effect on personal conduct for some, and self-censorship is one of the results. Indeed, psychologists have identified a neurosis that could never have existed without technological media, the "Truman Show syndrome," which is named after the 1998 movie about a television show that secretly broadcast all the details of one man’s life without his consent or awareness.

Social media is also a source for marketers and advertisers to glean information on consumers' personal tastes and interests. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States and six European nations strongly objected to Facebook's use of user monitoring for the sole purpose of tracking user browser habits. This monitoring in turn would influence advertising displayed to consumers. Consumer tracking and data sharing has been commonplace among internet marketers and advertisers for many years, but the tactics used by Facebook and other online sources are often viewed by consumers as overly aggressive, and anti-tracking technologies are becoming more and more popular.

In February 2015, news broke that Samsung was warning consumers to be careful what they said aloud in front of their Smart TVs because any and all spoken information had the potential to be recorded and then supplied to a third party, admitting that the television would eavesdrop on private conversations. (A "smart" TV is any television with internet capabilities.) The US Senate got involved and questioned both Samsung and LG regarding their privacy and data sharing policies. Samsung responded that speech-to-text information would only be gathered when the consumer pressed an activation button on the remote control. The company also provided the public with directions on disabling the voice-recognition feature in the televisions, thereby disengaging the television's ability to recognize and record voice commands in any form.

Another element of online privacy is data security, and in many places the security of people’s health information has increasingly been put in jeopardy. Multiple Canadians have been refused entry to the United States by US border guards because information related to their mental health, such as attempted suicides and certain forms of psychiatric care, had been uploaded to the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), to which US federal law enforcement officials have access. To one such woman, who was denied entry in 2013 because she had previously been hospitalized for clinical depression, the guard "cited the US Immigration and Nationality Act, which denies entry to people who have had a physical or mental disorder that may pose a 'threat to the property, safety or welfare' of themselves or others," according to a report on the CBC News website.

The future promised many more challenges to privacy in the online world. The emergence of internet-enabled objects (such as keys that contact their owners automatically if they turn up in an unusual or unexpected location) presented a further onslaught of privacy concerns, particularly as many residential items such as appliances were increasingly equipped with this capability, contributing to a growing "internet of things," by the 2020s.

In October 2016, near the end of US president Barack Obama's final term, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued new rules that would require internet service providers (ISPs) to obtain customer approval before selling their browsing data to advertisers and other third parties. The rules, titled "Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunication Services" in their final form, were intended to take effect near the end of 2017. However, a bill to repeal the new rules was passed by the Republican-dominated Congress in March 2017 and was signed into law by new president Donald Trump at the beginning of April. Because oversight of ISPs had been transferred from the FTC to the FCC, the latter having declared ISPs to be common telecommunications carriers in 2015 in an effort to preserve net neutrality, the repeal of the FCC rules left the ability of ISPs to collect and disseminate consumer data largely unregulated.

In early 2018, a scandal broke involving the security of user information on Facebook that caused further discussion regarding internet privacy. After nearly three hundred thousand users of the social media site took part in what was believed to be a personality survey in 2014 and it was discovered that data obtained from that survey (which was estimated to have involved more than fifty million users and their friends) was then sold to the data research firm Cambridge Analytica and was possibly used to target political advertising during the 2016 presidential election, questions were raised about Facebook's commitment to protecting its users' data.

Following this scandal, the next highest-profile development to lead to renewed focus on data privacy came in 2022 with the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. In addition to increased concerns over the potential for this ruling, which overturned the right to abortions, to negatively impact other rights that had not yet been codified such as marriage between same-sex couples, fears over the lack of legal data privacy protections grew. As several states moved to ban abortion, some argued that people using software applications and other means of digital data collection, particularly for such personal aspects as menstrual cycles, could face greater threats to the security of this information.

Cybercrime

Cybercrime has remained on the rise and the potential consequences can be disastrous for individuals and businesses. Attacks on e-commerce sites remained on the rise exponentially. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's 2021 report on internet crime, which annually collects data from the agency's Internet Crime Complaint Center, there were over 847,000 cybercrime complaints reported in 2021, a 7 percent increase from the previous year. In addition to ransomware and the criminal use of cryptocurrency, business email compromise represented one of the top complaints, with almost twenty thousand complaints of the latter equaling a loss of approximately $2.4 billion. Furthermore, there were almost fifty-two thousand victims each of personal data breach and identity theft that year alone. One strategy that businesses have used to protect user and company information and safeguard internet privacy is defense in depth, which utilizes the capabilities of available technology to guard against and monitor intrusions. Security measures are multilayered and intended to thwart an attack, slow down an attack that is not thwarted, and in turn accelerate the detection of and response to the attack.

Firewalls have been another method used to protect privacy. Firewalls are special-purpose software programs or pieces of computer hardware that are designed to prevent unauthorized access to a private network from the internet, or to the internet from a private network.

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