Fifth Blog - Key Privacy and Anonymity Issue
Blog # 5 - Key Privacy and Anonymity Issues
By: Nicole Bernal Marcial
Privacy is the key that unlocks the aspects of yourself that are most intimate and personal, that make you most you, and most vulnerable. Your naked body. Your sexual history and fantasies. Your past, present and possible future diseases. Your fears, your losses, your failures. The worst thing you have ever done, said, and thought. Your inadequacies, your mistakes, your traumas. The moment in which you have felt most ashamed. That family relation you wish you didn’t have. Your most drunken night.
When you give that key, your privacy, to someone who loves you, it will allow you to enjoy closeness, and they will use it to benefit you. Part of what it means to be close to someone is sharing what makes you vulnerable, giving them the power to hurt you, and trusting that person never to take advantage of the privileged position granted by intimacy. People who love you might use your date of birth to organise a surprise birthday party for you; they’ll make a note of your tastes to find you the perfect gift; they’ll take into account your darkest fears to keep you safe from the things that scare you. Not everyone will use access to your personal life in your interest, however. Fraudsters might use your date of birth to impersonate you while they commit a crime; companies might use your tastes to lure you into a bad deal; enemies might use your darkest fears to threaten and extort you. People who don’t have your best interest at heart will exploit your data to further their own agenda. Privacy matters because the lack of it gives others power over you.
You might think you have nothing to hide, nothing to fear. You are wrong unless you are an exhibitionist with masochistic desires of suffering identity theft, discrimination, joblessness, public humiliation and totalitarianism, among other misfortunes. You have plenty to hide, plenty to fear, and the fact that you don’t go around publishing your passwords or giving copies of your home keys to strangers attests to that.
When you give that key, your privacy, to someone who loves you, it will allow you to enjoy closeness, and they will use it to benefit you. Part of what it means to be close to someone is sharing what makes you vulnerable, giving them the power to hurt you, and trusting that person never to take advantage of the privileged position granted by intimacy. People who love you might use your date of birth to organise a surprise birthday party for you; they’ll make a note of your tastes to find you the perfect gift; they’ll take into account your darkest fears to keep you safe from the things that scare you. Not everyone will use access to your personal life in your interest, however. Fraudsters might use your date of birth to impersonate you while they commit a crime; companies might use your tastes to lure you into a bad deal; enemies might use your darkest fears to threaten and extort you. People who don’t have your best interest at heart will exploit your data to further their own agenda. Privacy matters because the lack of it gives others power over you.
You might think you have nothing to hide, nothing to fear. You are wrong unless you are an exhibitionist with masochistic desires of suffering identity theft, discrimination, joblessness, public humiliation and totalitarianism, among other misfortunes. You have plenty to hide, plenty to fear, and the fact that you don’t go around publishing your passwords or giving copies of your home keys to strangers attests to that.
Another key privacy and anonymity issue is about identity theft. The identity theft is a theft of key pieces of personal information to gain access to a person’s financial accounts. Information includes: name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, Passport number, Driver license number, and Mother’s maiden name. It is one of the fastest growing forms of fraud in the United States due to lack of initiative in informing people whose data was stolen. It can be done by phishing and spyware. Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998 was passed to fight fraud. Another key privacy and anonymity issue is about consumer profiling. Companies openly collect personal information about internet users but some companies don’t protect and respect customer information resulting to lose their business and some become defendants in class action lawsuits stemming from privacy violations. Opponents of consumer profiling are also concerned that personal data is being gathered and sold to other companies without the permission of consumers who provide the data. After the data has been collected, consumers have no way of knowing how it is used or who is using it. Using a web site in gathering consumer’s profiles, it may be stored on a user’s hard drive known as cookies. There are other means of collecting data while a consumer is surfing the Web. The three types are GET data which is the trail that a consumer take when they browse the web, POST data which is an information typed into blank fields, and Click stream data which us the history of the information of what the user sought and viewed.
Other marketers are using Personalization software to optimize the number, frequency, and mixture of their ad placements. These are its types: the Rules-based which ties business rules to customer-provided preferences, Collaborative-filtering which offers recommendations based on the types of products purchased, Demographic filtering which collects click-stream data with personal demographical data and the Contextual commerce which associates product promotions with specific content a user may be receiving. Another key privacy and anonymity issue is about need to treat customer data responsibly. When dealing with consumer data, strong measures are required to avoid customer relationship problems. A widely accepted approach to treating consumer responsibly is for a company to adopt the Fair Information Practices and the 1980 OECD privacy guidelines. Under these guidelines, an organization collects only personal information that is necessary to deliver its product or service. The company ensures that the information is carefully protected and accessible only by those with a need to know, and that consumers can review their own data and make corrections. The company informs customers if it intends to use customer information for research or marketing, and it provides a means for them to opt out. Another key privacy and anonymity issue is about workplace monitoring. This is for the employers for them to monitor workers. 78% of major U.S. firms record and review employee communications and activities like phone calls, e-mails, internet connections, computer files and videotaping. The Fourth Amendment cannot be used to limit how a private employer treats its employees because public-sector employees have far greater privacy rights than in the private industry. Also, privacy advocate want federal legislation to keep employers from infringing upon privacy rights of employees. Another key privacy and anonymity issue is about spamming. Spamming is the sending of many copies of the same messages in an attempt to force a large number of people to read a message they would otherwise choose not to receive. The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CANSPAM) says it is legal to spam but spammers cannot disguise their identity, there must be a label in the message specifying that the e-mail is an ad or solicitation, and they must include a way for recipients to indicate they do not want future mass mailings. Last key privacy and anonymity issue is about advanced surveillance techniques. This key privacy is about Camera surveillance which U.S. cities plan to expand surveillance systems, Facial recognition software which identifies criminal suspects and other undesirable characters and yields mixed results and Global Positioning System (GPS) chips which are placed in many devices and precisely locate users.
By now, most people are aware that their data is worth money. But your data is not valuable only because it can be sold. Facebook does not technically sell your data, for instance. Nor does Google. They sell the power to influence you. They sell the power to show you ads, and the power to predict your behaviour. Google and Facebook are not really in the business of data – they are in the business of power. Even more than monetary gain, personal data bestows power on those who collect and analyse it, and that is what makes it so coveted.In my opinion, it is important to have privacy protection but the use of information technology in business requires the balancing of the needs of those who use information about individuals against the rights and desires of those individuals whose information may be used.
It is okay for you that someone knows your password on your cellphone or Social Media Account?
In my opinion, it depends upon how much you trust the person. I know my little sister's email passwords and have them stored in my password manager. That way when she forgets them I can look them up. However, very rarely does anyone. ever need to know your password to anything. No one you don't personally know needs to ever know your personal passwords. So, I wouldn't give my password to someone who was just asking for it without having a reason that I needed to give it to them, and that certainly doesn't include them just asking for it. Giving your personal password is too dangerous.
In my opinion, it depends upon how much you trust the person. I know my little sister's email passwords and have them stored in my password manager. That way when she forgets them I can look them up. However, very rarely does anyone. ever need to know your password to anything. No one you don't personally know needs to ever know your personal passwords. So, I wouldn't give my password to someone who was just asking for it without having a reason that I needed to give it to them, and that certainly doesn't include them just asking for it. Giving your personal password is too dangerous.
Comments
Post a Comment