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Online Privacy and Your Digital Footprint

Why is your privacy so important?

 

Privacy in a legal sense means the rights of the individual to make personal decisions and conduct their lives without public scrutiny.  The right to privacy is protected by the Constitution and inferred in the language of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

Digital privacy concerns the rights of individuals to decide how their digital information (personally identifiable information) is collected and used.

Daniel J. Solove,Yale Law School graduate and the John Marshall Harlan Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, articulates 10 reasons privacy is important:

  1. Limit on power,
  2. Respect for the individual,
  3. Reputation management,
  4. Respect for social boundaries,
  5. Trust,
  6. Control over one's life,
  7. Freedom of thought and speech,
  8. Freedom of social and political activities,
  9. Ability to change and have second chances, and
  10. Not having to explain or justify yourself.

Data Privacy / Information Privacy

Internet technologies make it very easy to collect all kinds of information about us, from sources like:

  • Healthcare / medical records
  • Criminal justice investigations and proceedings, police records, etc.
  • Financial institutions and transactions (banking, online purchases)
  • Biological traits, such as genetic material
  • Residence and geographic records (addresses)
  • Location-based service and geolocation (GPS data)
  • Web surfing behavior (click-throughs, web logs) or user preferences using persistent cookies 
  • Academic research
  • Metadata: "Invisible" data that is attached to devices you use or artifacts you upload/download. This can include things like: 

    • Browser/OS data - Information about what device's operating system is being used. This may also include why type and version of a browser. This information is passively gathered when accessing websites.  Open this site to see what your browser already knows about you, right now: https://webkay.robinlinus.com/

    • IP address - the Internet address of your device. This can be used to determine a user's location. It can also be used to trace back to a specific device when accessing a web site or sending an email.

    • Timestamp, location, file size, editing history of a photo on social media

    • Geolocation data - data about where you are. This can include the embedded metadata of a photo, where you accessed a service on a mobile browser, or where your cell phone is geographically located when making a call or sending/receiving a text message.

Source: Wikipedia

Big Data projects - large collections of data elements from many different sources - make it easy for government agencies, advertisers, corporations, private investigators and individual to put together a lot of personal information about us, to target us and to track our actions. Data mining and data analytics are big businesses today.

Student's Privacy

When you are a student, existing laws give some privacy protection for portions of your student record and contact information, through the Family Education Right to Privacy Act (FERPA).

Students in grades k-12 in some states, like California, also have some protections under the state Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (SOPIPA). Those laws apply to how schools are required to handle your information, but they do not automatically protect you from hacking or data theft.

Privacy Preferences

The San Jose Public Library's Virtual Privacy Lab points out that:

"People are comfortable with different levels of privacy in different aspects of their lives. Some want to keep their work and personal lives separate, while others want to avoid government monitoring or prevent corporations from using their data for profit. Some people want to restrict who sees their personal information as much as possible while on the other hand, some are not at all concerned about privacy and freely volunteer their information if it’s convenient or beneficial to them.

To maintain your own privacy and to respect the wishes of others, it’s important to think and talk about privacy preferences and to apply that thinking proactively when you use technology, for example by reviewing privacy settings. Knowing about how online information sharing works, and what the potential consequences can be, will help you make informed choices about privacy.".