Role of the State in Internet Privacy Protection - Case Study Example

The Number 17 June Role of the in Internet Privacy Protection While the number of internet users israpidly growing, a number of concerns related to the use of the World Wide Web has multiplied recently. At the turn of the 19th century privacy was defined as the “right to be let alone” (Warren & Brandeis 193) Whereas internet users agree that privacy is generally about human dignity as well as protection of private property, in the virtual world, this notion is narrowed. To specify, information privacy is believed to exist if one is able to monitor the usage of personal information, its circulation, and release (Culnan 341). With the rapid growth of the web space and technology advancement, concerns of users’ about personal privacy threats are also growing. Research into the issue found that internet users today are exposed to embarrassment, stalking, cyber-bullying, blackmailing, and identity hacking due to users’ displaying lots of personal data. This has led many people believe that internet privacy does not exist at all and is impossible to control. Others believe that the issue of internet privacy is not that important and should be regulated by the market. In my view, internet privacy exists once it is protected by the law. Many people believe that maintaining privacy on the internet and particularly while visiting social networking web sites is their basic human right. So they suppose that the basic thing they need to do to protect their privacy is to simply adjust the privacy settings, Steven Rambam and other interested authors think that privacy does not at all exist on the internet. Rambam, a private investigator and director of Pallorium Investigative Agency, expressed these ideas in a series of talks at U.S. conferences. His basic idea is “Privacy is Dead – Get Over It”. Rambam’s talk about death of privacy at the 8th www.Toor.Con.org Information Security Conference in 2006, in San Diego, California, provides a detailed overview of online databases and resources which, as Rambam asserts, are actively used with investigative purposes. “Digital footprints” which are left virtually by everybody these days help Rambam retrieve up to 500 pages of personal data in a few hours about an individual unfamiliar to him (Rambam, “Privacy is Dead – Get Over It”) At the Last HOPE Conference, Rambam discussed the process of searching for necessary information on the internet via intrusion into privacy, which as the investigator notes “is out of the bottle” (Mills, “The Internet – a Private Eye’s Best Friend”). Rambam argues that each new search through Google, every blog post, and each new photo posted online mean further losing the battle led for privacy protection. This can be explained by the fact that “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”). Rambam specifies that every kind of information online is digitized, with older information scanned and placed online. Afterwards, this mixture gets aggregated into special databases which are later sold to government agencies, marketers, and practically anyone capable of purchasing it. Twitter, cell phones, taking photos by iPods, etc are effective tools for identifying individual’s location, preferences in buying and similar information is collected by special marketing databases that are usually bought by the government. Due to the use of the information supplied by consumer databases, individuals are tracked down by the police, different collection agencies, and the U.S. Marshall’s Service (Mills, “The Internet – a Private Eye’s Best Friend”). The question arises then: what to do about this? It seems Rambam’s advice is to just “get over” the reality that privacy is dead on the internet. Next, many researchers acknowledge that privacy is under threat on the internet and suggest how to protect it. Specifically, the scientists from Bryant University, USA found that consumers today encounter a high privacy invasion level. Still, Li and Zhang believe that privacy can be effectively provided by organizations’ adopting strict privacy protection policies and enhancing consumers’ privacy awareness. While recognizing that disclosing the information to the third parties brings too much profit to refuse from, Li and Zhang argue that this is a good way to provide privacy in the future and they use Fortune 100 companies as an example (Li & Zhang 2128). Alternatively, Ruben Rodrigues suggests that the level of social networking privacy provision is dependent on the policies of user friendly sites (Rodrigues 239). Rodrigues comments that these sites’ decisions are dictated by market competition. Robust market competition is known to be the driving force behind privacy-enhancing measures on social networking sites. In particular, the role of market competition is acknowledged in terms of user control promotion, privacy policy design, and user information abuse (Rodrigues 239). Rodrigues concludes that privacy can and need be maintained given the tough competition in the market. A range of authors participating in the debate about privacy recognize that it is impossible to maintain online privacy because of the specifics of the internet and certain benefits related to privacy intrusion by the third parties. At the same time, these authors assert that users need not worry because (as they explain) this process is normal and does not threaten consumers. For instance, Ira Brodsky, Head of Datacomm Research Co, claims that privacy is not a basic human right. Thus, concerns about privacy hinder the free flow in information on the wen and the development of the Internet. In the article entitled “In Cyberspace, There’s No Right to Privacy”, Brodsky argues that demands to legally restrict the data that websites collect and sell about users are “unfair and unnecessary” (Brodsky 57). In addition, Brodsky opines that if website owners are forbidden to record actions of the users, this will trample on their rights. Therefore, users do not “have the right to force Web sites to comply with those standards” (Brodsky 57). Having described in detail the most prominent views on the existence and possibility of achievement of the privacy on the web, I would like to express my agreements and disagreements regarding these positions. As for the views of Steve Rambam and authors that deny the idea of internet privacy existence, I think, they are rather sound. Internet is a convenient way to obtain information about people, especially in the developed states, such as the United States. Just as control over the public remains the first and foremost task of any power, it will without hesitation use easy access to the private data for the reasons of security. Besides, all web sites we visit every day belong to somebody, so the owners are likely to feel they are empowered to manage users’ data as they wish. Numerous news items in the media provide accounts of spying programs, sold personal data, violation of privacy rights of the customers by social networking sites owners. Given the fact these sites are free and at the same time capable of bringing huge profits to their founders, one can easily believe Steve Rambam that behind the noble cause of helping people find one another, there is a bunch of less noble, down-to-earth purposes of running these sites. Regarding the position expressed by Rodriguez, it enables to view the problem from a different perspective. Rodrigues opines that privacy will be automatically cared for by the web site owners’ because they would not want to lose their customers and their position in the market. Thus, relying on market and financial interest is seen as a way out. While this sounds true to some extent, it seems unlikely that web site owners start really care about their users the way users care about themselves. It seems rather doubtful that web site owners will enhance privacy and stop selling data to the third parties. Probably, they will just spend more money on concealing their activities and limit their practices to some extent, but they won’t stop violating privacy the way users would want. In addition, I fully disagree with Ira Brodsky that privacy enhancement violates the rights of business. Was the internet created for business? We live in a capitalist society where market is the primary thing within the economy, but does it mean that all spheres of life should be labeled as “sell and buy”? As a Christian society, we should be first of all concerned about interests of people, not businesses, with Man being the highest value. I have a very nice suggestion to Brodsky, if you do not like the way users behave on the internet, kindly get out of it. You may do your business selling things in the street, not in the virtual world, and this will cause you less trouble since nobody will trample your rights. Agreeing that in reality it is impossible to achieve full privacy on the internet just because the FBI and alike organizations will never refuse from using the private data, I still believe privacy can be reached partially. In particular, relative privacy can be reached through “top-down” regulation by the State. My position is in tune with the ideas expressed by Paul Schwarz , Professor of Law from Brooklyn Law School. In particular, Schwarz is similarly aware that even deleted information, if it has once been on the web, can be retrieved. He provides an example with Monika Lewinski’s emails deleted at her computer but retrieved and later published by the Office of the Independent Counsel and investigators. At the same time, Paul Schwartz recognizes the role of the state in protection of human rights of its citizens, so he suggests that 1) State’s role is to create and maintain special conditions that will ensure the functioning of the privacy market; 2) work out a series of privacy norms which would bar access to personal data “that would cause too great a rate of preference falsification in society” (Shwartz 817). Schwarz is not alone in his support for government regulation of the privacy intrusion on the internet. Specifically, Lawrence Lessig in his book called “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” asserts that code is what necessarily has to be regulated on the Internet by state. By the code, he means the architecture. Importantly, in Lessig’s view, this issue is that of public policy. To illustrate, Lessig writes: “But isn’t it clear that government should do something to make this architecture consistent with important public values? If commerce is going to define the emerging architectures of cyberspace, isnt the role of government to ensure that those public values that are not in commerces interest are also built into the architecture?” (Lessig 59) Lessig further explains that architecture should be understood as a kind of law which determines what users can and cannot do. In case the architecture is determined by commercial interests, privatized law is created. Yet, the problem of the code should be addressed by the government, not market. Lessig explains that in the modern world writers of codes are predominantly lawmakers. Their job is to determine the possible defaults of the internet, as well as “whether privacy will be protected; the degree to which anonymity will be allowed; the extent to which access will be guaranteed”. Thus, only justice has a right to regulate the code. (Lessig 60) Possible objection to the role of the state in providing legal protection of privacy is as follows: the state authority itself violates privacy of users by domestic surveillance. This, for example, is well described by Reg Whitaker, the author of “The End of Privacy. How total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality”. In his book, Whitaker calls the activity of the government in respect to using the Internet to track citizens “the pervasive and intrusive surveillance and regulation of everyday life” (Whitaker 19). While new data on the state’s surveillance and privacy violating activity appear on the Internet almost every day, Americans are still not so much bothered about government intrusion. It seems many Americans are willing to sacrifice personal privacy for security and national security in particular. To illustrate, the information obtained as a result of the survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that as many as 54 per cent of American citizens approve of the FBI’s idea of monitoring the electronic mail if possible suspects, whereas 34 per cent disapprove. At the same time, public support is equal for postal mail, e-mail, or phone calls monitoring. However, only 31 per cent of citizens reported trusting the government to act like this all of the time or most of the time (Fox, “Fear of Online Crime”). The argument against governmental control based on recognizing its spying purposes is hard to disprove since it is based on true facts. The only good advice here is just to “get over it”, as Rambam says. Still, one needs to remember that government might not be the biggest interested intruder. Market is much more dangerous. So it is government’s role to protect users’ privacy from the intrusion in the market. As a saying goes, “of two evils choose the less”. A few steps have been made already in providing legal protection for internet users, but this seems to be insufficient given a number of complaints from users and the growing number of cases of security and privacy violation. For example, some of the state and federal laws aim at protection of private information a user does not want to disclose. Another set of laws was developed with the purpose to protect the data which is disclosed only to a certain web site and thus not meant to be accessed by the third parties. I would like to emphasize, that this is clearly not enough. The government should first of all create and legally enact the policies of privacy for internet sites, as for example, in California. Secondly, the government should enact laws that would restrict government’s intrusion, too. Once these basic steps are made, privacy protection will be greatly enhanced. Works Cited Brodsky, Ira. “In Cyberspace, there is no right to privacy”. Network World. June 21, 1999, p. 57. Print. Culnan, Mary. “How Did They Get My Name? An Exploratory Investigation of Consumer Attitudes Towards Secondary Information Use.” MIS Quarterly, 1993, 17(3), pp. 341- 361. Print. Fox, Susannah and Oliver Lewis. “Fear of Online Crime.” Washington, D.C. Pew Internet & American Life Project. 2001. Web. 16 July 2012. http://www.pewinternet.org Lessig, Lawrence. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. Basic Books. New York, 1999. Print. Li, Suhong and Zhang, Chen. “An Analysis of Online Privacy Policies of Fortune 100 Companies”. In Chen Kuanchin and Adam Fadlalla (Eds) Online Consumer Protection: Theories of Human Relativism, pp. 2127-2136. Idea Group Inc. Print. Mills, Elinor. “The Internet – a private eye’s best friend” CNET. July 20, 2008. Web. July 13, 2012. < http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-9995207-83.html>. Rambam, Steve. “Privacy is Dead – Get Over It” A Talk Given at the 8th www.ToorCon.org Information Security Conference, Sept 30th and Aug 1st, 2006 in San Diego, California. www.MediaArchives.com. 2007. Web. July 13, 2012. < http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-383709537384528624 > Rodriguez, Ruben. “Privacy on Social Networks: Norms, Markets and Natural Monopoly” In Saul Levmore and Martha Craven The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation, pp.237-258. Print. Schwartz, Paul. “Internet Privacy and the State”. Connecticut Law Review. 11 May 2000. Web. 13 July 2012. http://www.paulschwartz.net/pdf/SCHWARTZ-CK1A.pdf. Whitaker, Reg. The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality. The New Press. New York, 1999. Print. Read More