Privacy and the Internet
Concerns about privacy in cyberspace are an issue of international debate. As reading and writing, health care and shopping, and sex and gossip increasingly take place in cyberspace, citizens around the world are concerned that the most intimate details of their daily lives are being monitored, searched, recorded, stored, and often misinterpreted when taken out of context. For many, the greatest threats to privacy come not from state agents but from the architecture of e-commerce itself, which is based, in unprecedented ways, on the recording and exchange of intimate personal information.
Issues in new media
Changes in the delivery of books, music, and television extended the technologies of surveillance beyond the office, blurring the boundaries between work and home. The same technologies that make it possible to download digitally stored books, songs, and movies directly onto computer hard drives or mobile devices could make it possible for publishers and entertainment companies to record and monitor each individual’s browsing habits with unsettling specificity. Television too is being redesigned to create precise records of viewing habits. For instance, digital video recorders make it possible to store hours of television programs and enable viewers to skip commercials and to create their own program line ups. The data generated by such actions could create viewer profiles, which could then be used to make viewing suggestions and to record future shows.
Privacy of cell phone communication also has become an issue, especially with the advent of nearly undetectable spyware and the professed need by national governments to monitor criminals who used wireless communications. The controversy over Pegasus spyware is a prime case in point. The Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group (founded in 2010) created the smartphone-attached spyware for eavesdropping on phones and harvesting their data (including calls, texts, photos, passwords, and locations). The company claims its product, which can steal private data without leaving an obvious trace of its actions, is sold exclusively to government security and law enforcement agencies and only for the purpose of aiding rescue operations and battling criminals, such as money launderers, sex- and drug-traffickers, and terrorists. Yet, Pegasus has been used to track politicians, government leaders, human rights activists, dissidents, and journalists. Photos and videos also emerged as unexpected threats to personal privacy. “Geotags” are created when photos or videos are embedded with geographic location data from GPS chips inside cameras, including those in cell phones. When images are uploaded to the Internet, the geotags allow homes or other personal locations within the images to be precisely located by those who view the photos online. The security risk is not widely understood by the public, however, and in some cases disabling the geotag feature in certain models of digital cameras and camera-equipped smartphones is complicated. Another privacy issue is cyberbullying—using the Internet to threaten or humiliate another person with words, photos, or videos. The problem received particular attention in 2010 when a male Rutgers University student committed suicide after two acquaintances reportedly streamed a video over the Internet of the student having a sexual encounter with a man. Also in 2010, Donna Witsell, the mother of a 13-year-old Florida girl who had committed suicide in 2009 after a cyberbullying incident, formed a group called Hope’s Warriors to help curb abuse and to warn others of the threat. Most U.S. states have enacted laws against bullying, although very few of them include cyberbullying.
