Privacy

Draft

Introduction

Privacy concerns “the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively. The boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and individuals, but share basic common themes. Privacy is sometimes related to anonymity, the wish to remain unnoticed or unidentified in the public realm.” (Wikipedia, retrieved 18:29, 6 July 2011 (CEST))

Massive use of ICT in business and private life has led to personally identifiable information (PII), i.e. information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual (Wikipedia). In addition, the use of social software and in particular social networking applications like Facebook allows to draw quite extensive digital profiles of many people. This situation requires - at least in principle - that persons adopt some kind of strategy to manage this information (Jones, 2008).

Wikipedia's Internet privacy article lists several types of risks to privacy, i.e. HTTP cookies, Flash cookies, Evercookies, Photographs, ernet, Search engines, Data logging, Privacy within social networking sites, and Internet service providers. Some Personal Information Management tools also may touch privacy issues.

For some people, e.g. Dürhager and Heuer (German), Internet privacy is not an issue.

See also: ICT in society, Data protection and privacy rules for research and online identity

Software

End-user tools for web users

• Ghostery is a browser plugin that “sees the invisible web - tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons. Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.”

• Lightbeam. Will tell you who is spying on you. When you start it, it will track and visualize all websites that interact with your page and your browser.

• DuckDuckGo is a search engine that provides privacy, i.e. you will not be tracked.

Spyware

Such software can just trace browsing activities or be much more intrusive, i.e. record all keystrokes and user interactions on a device.

• Various analytics tools
• Remote Control System (RCS), by Milan-based Hacking Team

Links

From Wikipedia

• Identity_in_the_Information_Society
• Privacy (Wikipedia)
• Privacy Internet Privacy (Wikipedia).
• Personally identifiable information
• Personal identity (philosophy)
• Identity (social science)

Organizations

• IEEE PDP - Personal Data Privacy Working Group. Works on P7002 - Data Privacy Process

Not concerned

• Dürhager, Robert und Timo Heuer (2009) DNAdigital Manifest der Digital Natives, version 1.06, last consulted June 2011.

Various

• Big Brother collecting big data — and in China, it's all for sale, By Saša Petricic, CBC News Posted: Jan 11, 2017
  • One App, Two Systems: How WeChat uses one censorship policy in China and another internationally, CitizenLab.org, November 30, 2016
• Cyberwar for sale (New York Times Magazine, Jan 4, 2017.) Interesting story about companies that will trace your email and worse ...
  • Hacking Team and the Targeting of Ethiopian Journalists, Citizenlab.org, February 12, 2014

Courses

• Two lesson introduction (D. Schneider/Webster Univ.)

Bibliography

• Ahmed M, Hoang HH, Karim MS, Khusro S, Lanzenberger M, Latif K, Michlmayr E, Mustofa K, Nguyen HT, Rauber A, Schatten A, Tho MN, Tjoa AM (2004).SemanticLIFE: a framework for managing information of a human lifetime, 6th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-Based Applications and Services (IIWAS), Jakarta, Indonesia. http://storm.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/publications/iiwas2004.pdf.

• Cheng WC, Golubchik L, Kay DG (2004). Total Recall: are privacy changes inevitable? In Proceedings of the Capture, Archive and Retrieval of Personal Experiences Workshop (CARPE) at ACM Multimedia 2004, New York. http://bourbon.usc.edu/iml/recall/papers/carpe2k4-pub.pdf.

• Coughlin K (2007). Tracking himself, so the FBI won't have to, Digital Life with the Star Ledger, 28th October 2007. http://blog.nj.com/digitallife/2007/10/tracking_himself_so_the_fbi_wo.html.

• Taylor, John A. (2008), "Zero Privacy", IEEE Spectrum 45 (7): 20-20, doi:10.1109/MSPEC.2008.4547499

• Jones D. How to protect your good name against cyberspite, New Scientist. May, 2008a; 24-25.

• O'Hara, Kieron; Tuffield, Mischa M.; Shadbolt, Nigel (2009), "Lifelogging: Privacy and empowerment with memories for life", Identity in the Information Society (Springer), doi:10.1007/s12394-009-0008-4

• Pounder, C. N. M. (2009), "Nine principles for assessing whether privacy is protected in a surveillance society", Identity in the Information Society (Springer), doi:10.1007/s12394-008-0002-2