The Challenges in Web Privacy and Security - Research Paper Example

? 4 July, The challenges in Web Privacy and security: How private is your personal information? Introduction: Internet has brought a revolution in information in the recent decades. The ease with which information can be accessed has been made negative use of by certain individuals, agencies or parties who intrude into people’s private accounts in an attempt to gain personal information and blackmail them for personal gains. A whole range of methods have conventionally been proposed in order to counter this problem in the past, but all such efforts have generally went awry. The regulatory measures that have been taken with a view to addressing this issue have met with limited success. The e-business is being affected by the incompatibilities between the privacy standards and regulations. One of the potential examples of this is the fact that hundreds of thousands of consumers in the Europe are not able to be traded with the US Web-based businesses because their standards are not consistent with the Data Protection Directive of the European Union (European Union). Thus, the issue of Web privacy needs to be looked into thoroughly so that amicable solutions may be worked out. This paper discusses some of the most important and significant issues of Web privacy and proposes solutions for them. Background: Social network services (SNS) unite people from all over the world by forming their communities in which they can express and share their views and opinions. Such SNSs as Facebook, Orkut and MySpace have been the fundamental means of virtual socialization since the time they were formed (Barker, 2009). Although SNSs have provided people with a whole set of opportunities utilizing which, they can communicate better and exchange views among one another, yet security of information and privacy of the users have emerged as some of the most critical problems. When someone finds way to the protected coding of a site of the written language, he/she essentially raises extremely important security issues. Such issues may or may not include security breaches. The whole process is very risky because one’s personal information is just a password away from the hackers that may be read through observing the finger movement while one is typing it on one’s keyboard. As a result, personal information becomes available to masses. This information may include videos and pictures in large quantities. Once published online, there is no guarantee that the data will be used only as per the user’s demand. “If attackers use an SNS to gather enough personal information to guess a user’s password or other authentication mechanism, they can change the user’s settings and personal history and track the user’s comings and goings” (Shin 428). This is the fundamental cause of increase of cyber crime in the recent years. There is dire need to take objective measures in order to increase the security of information available online so that people may make best use of Internet without having to suffer from the leak-out of personal information. Generalizations: Two factors that are fundamentally responsible for the problem of insecurity on the Internet are the complex flow of information related to a number of Web-based transactions which are used for transferring private information, and the Web’s nondeterministic and inherently overt nature. Contrast between the conventional enterprise networks and Web can be made in order to understand the open nature of Web. In the traditional enterprise networks, only those users can access the sources of data that are able to attain a range of predefined privileges. Contrary to the traditional model, the Web maintains a highly insecure and open mechanism whereby the information can be accessed by many unknown users. Applications that include interactions between the government and citizens, and governments and businesses as well as the interaction of one business with another explain why the flow of information concerning the Web-based transactions is so complicated. Sometimes, an application’s intrinsic flow of work discloses the personal information of a user to several parties. One class of Web-based applications that is particularly caught in the issue of Web privacy is the digital government. The agencies of government assemble and process the private information regarding hundreds of thousands of people. Regulations implemented by the government are thought to protect the individuals’ privacy on the Internet. Although users place confidence in the government agencies, yet these agencies experience trouble gathering personal information from the civil libertarians. “Law enforcement agencies have a vested interest in collecting information about unsuspecting citizens for intelligence gathering and investigations” (Rezgui, Bouguettaya, and Eltoweissy 41). Solutions for the problem of privacy can be classified into two types, namely the technology-enabled solutions and the regulation-enabled solutions. Technology-enabled solutions can further be classified into the client-based solutions, server-based solutions, and the client-server-based solutions. On the other hand, the regulation-enabled solutions can further be classified into self regulation and mandatory regulation. Client-based solutions include but are not limited to the use of proxy-based anonymizers, routing-based anonymizers, mix-based anonymizers, and the peer-to-peer anonymizers. Client-server-based solutions may include negotiation-based solutions and encryption-bases solutions. A vast majority of the technology-based solutions achieve their purpose by targeting the privacy of the network. Such solutions combine request rerouting or encryption so that the data can be secured, but they come with a number of constraints. It is difficult to install and use such tools. “Systems requiring modi?cation of network protocols or access to proxy servers might be behind ?rewalls or inaccessible to users of custom Internet access software” (Rezgui, Bouguettaya, and Eltoweissy 48). Conclusion: Security of information uploaded on the Internet has been a great problem in the recent years when the SNSs have flourished. People have conventionally suffered from lack of security. Leak-out of personal information gives the offender chance to take undue advantage. Although it is not possible to completely eradicate this issue, yet certain technology-enabled and regulation-enabled solutions can be devised. These measures have not met with complete success, yet they are sufficiently strong to protect the personal information on the Web, and are hence, increasingly being adopted by people all over the world. Works Cited: Barker, V., (2009). Older adolescents’ motivations for social network site use. CyberPsychology and Behavior. vol. 10. no. 3. pp. 478–481. European Union, “Final EU Data Protection Directive,” Official J. European Communities. no L. 281, 23. Nov. 1995. Rezgui, Abdelmounaam; Bouguettaya, Athman; and Eltoweiss, Mohamed Y. “Privacy on the Web: Facts, Challenges, and Solutions.” The IEEE Computer Society. 2003. Shin, Dong-Hee. “The effects of trust, security and privacy in social networking: A security-based approach to understand the pattern of adoption.” Interacting with Computers. vol. 22 (2010). pp. 428–438. Read More