Internet and Social Networking Privacy - Essay Example

I have identified three major trends in approaching this question among the authors of articles and books on Internet privacy. The first one is the view that the Internet privacy does not exist at all. Secondly, some authors acknowledge that privacy on the Internet may be reached through certain measures and that privacy exists/may exist but always to certain extent. Thirdly, there are authors who claim that privacy on the Internet is not something to worry about, since it is normal that it may be violated for the sake of the third party’s interests.

More than a hundred years ago privacy was defined as the “right to be let alone” (Warren & Brandeis 193) While users generally agree that privacy is basically about human dignity as well as protection of private property, in the virtual world, this notion is narrowed. Specifically, information privacy is thought to exist if one is able to control the usage, circulation, as well as release of personal information (Culnan 341). With the rapid growth of the web space and progress of technology, concerns of users’ regarding personal privacy threats are growing, too.

While many people sincerely believe that maintaining privacy while on the Internet and especially while visiting social networking sites is their basic right and the basic thing you need to do to protect your privacy is to merely adjust the privacy settings, Steven Rambam and other authors believe that privacy does not exist on the Internet. A private investigator and head of Pallorium Investigative Agency, Rambam gave a few talks at American conferences whose basic idea was “Privacy is Dead – Get Over It”.

In particular, in his talk on privacy death at the 8th www.Toor.Con.org Information Security Conference in San Diego back in 2006, Rambam provided an overview of online databases and resources that could effectively be used with investigative purposes. “Digital footprints” left practically by everybody today help Rambam retrieve as many as up to 500 pages of personal information in just a few hours about a person he is not familiar with at all (Rambam, “Privacy is Dead – Get Over It”) At the Last HOPE Conference, Rambam described the process of finding necessary information on the Internet through intrusion into privacy, which as the speaker remarkably noted “is out of the bottle” (Mills, “The Internet – a Private Eye’s Best Friend”).

Specifically, every search through Google, each blog post, and each photo posted online mean further losing the fight over privacy protection for users. This is because “anything you put on the Internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it” (Mills, “The Internet – a Private Eye’s Best Friend”). According to Rambam, every kind of information online is digitized, with older information scanned and placed online, after which this mixture gets aggregated into special databases sold to government agencies, marketers, and virtually anyone able to pay for it.

Twitter, cell phones, taking photos by iPods, etc are all tools to identify a person’s location; buying preferences and alike information is gathered by marketing databases that are bought by the government. Thanks to using the information provided by