Now that I have explained the laws governing privacy on the Internet, you may be wondering why exactly privacy is so important. In this post I will give my opinions on why privacy is an issue we should be concerned about.
Technology has fundamentally changed how people think about privacy and how much privacy we can expect to have. In the “real world,” it is usually clear whether our doings are private or not. Inside our homes, we can usually assume that, unless we make a lot of noise or see someone peeking in the window, no one knows what we are doing. When we are in the street, a store, or a restaurant, we know that other people can easily observe our actions, so we act accordingly, avoiding doing anything that we wouldn’t want people to see.
On the Internet, however, it is unclear at first glance how private our actions are. Visiting a URL or typing a query into a search engine does not involve face-to-face communication, so some people may assume that such actions are private. After all, one may think, I didn’t tell anyone what I was searching for, and no one saw me do it, so how could anyone tell what I did? This is what I assumed when I first used the Internet at home at the age of ten or eleven, and many people who don’t know much about technology probably make similar assumptions.
Of course, as I became more knowledgeable about technology, I realized that my sense of privacy was an illusion. Webmasters have the technological capacity to track numerous pieces of data about their users, including what sites they visited immediately before and after the site in question, how long they spend on the site, their geographic location, what links they click on, and what words and phrases they search for. Many sites, especially those run by individuals as opposed to large corporations, lack privacy policies. I’d bet that the majority of people don’t even bother to read privacy policies on the sites that do have them; I didn’t before I took Cyberspace in Court!
As a result, many people are unaware of how much privacy they are giving up when they use the Internet. People should be more careful to inform themselves about the privacy policies of the websites they visit. Webmasters should make sure that they have a privacy policy if they collect data about their users, and they should try to display their privacy policies more prominently and make them easier to understand.
In my opinion, the privacy and anonymity of the Internet are among its greatest assets. The privacy of the Internet enables people to find information on health conditions they may be embarrassed to ask their doctors about, or to research interesting but unpopular subjects such as Nazi Germany or terrorism, which they might not feel comfortable researching in a library or bookstore. Additionally, people who are shy or hold unpopular views can express their opinions in blogs or forums, whereas they might hide their opinions if the only way they could communicate was face to face.
Privacy and anonymity benefit not only people who do illegal or immoral things, but also those who do legitimate research and express valuable opinions. As websites track more and more information about their users, people’s sense of privacy decreases, and the Internet loses some of its usefulness.
Because young people are the most frequent users of the Internet, webmasters have great power to shape future generations’ attitudes about privacy. If people grow up in a world where everything they do online is monitored and recorded, they might have no concept of privacy and believe that by default, everything they do is public.
For these reasons, I believe privacy is an issue about which everyone should be concerned. People should educate themselves about how much privacy they have online, and webmasters should be thoughtful and cautious about decreasing the privacy of their users.