The modern world is unimaginable without the presence of internet in people’s life. From business to marriages, education, entertainment, dating & communication, everything takes place on the World Wide Web.
Social networking website such as Orkut and facebook has become an integral part of everyone, these days. However, this has also created lots of apprehensions in people’s mind regarding privacy of personal & professional information.
Facebook facilitates its’ users chose a specific level of privacy. They can easily decide whether or not they want to restrict someone from accessing their profile. One can choose from everyone, ‘friends’ or ‘friends of friends’ option to restrict access to their profile.
In case, you choose ‘everyone’ your personal and professional information will be viewed by everyone regardless of whether you know the individual personally or not.
This may be very simple for regular users but for those who are new to most of the websites may find it a little confusing. Most people do not know that these websites tend to display users personal and professional information such as education, Work, Name, Family, relationship etc & post to al visitors unless the user manages privacy setting personally.
This is an issue of concern. The information of users can be mis-used or accessesed without their knowledge or consent.
Sources form electronic privacy information center (EPIC), a Washington based group focusing on public concerns on privacy policies & issues has admitted that privacy infringement has raised an alert world wide. It has also been proved that information of users is being accessed without their knowledge or consent via various search engines, websites, email or social networking sites.
Now, the question is, how does this happen?
Internet protocol addresses or IP addresses are capable of identifying unique computers. These addresses are also known to be the primary process that makes the information submitted to search engines personally identifiable. Other methods include usage of cookies and search query analysis.
Most users do not have the slightest idea that their personally identifiable data is being collected by search engines.
Why would popular search engines do this? How would they use this information?
Privacy of online users face threats from two different streams. These include governments and various private organizations. The government wants to seek greater access lives of common people private companies want to use the data to promote themselves & their products.
In case, a company wants to retrieve information related to you, it would simply reach google or Microsoft for the same. There are several companies who want to sell their ads to you. They will make efforts to know who you are, what you do, what your interests are and what products you use currently. This does not seem to be much hazards as companies who want to sell you something would just promote their products. They may not harm you actually.
However, this is essentially a cause of concern because there is a lot of potential of misuse here.
Excessive collection of personal data by companies associated to the World Wide Web has led to the problem of identity theft. This is a major problem in the United States. People are not comfortable relying on the internet. They are constantly disturbed by the thoughts of their data being misused.
Individual private rights have never been a major issue in India. However, today the situation has taken a different turn.
The privacy of internet users can be easily misused by telemarketer and various private organizations. The popularity of internet, rapid growth of e-commerce and e-governance has raised a question mark on privacy of a large number of people who use internet regularly.
With the growth in the awareness about privacy issue of online users, the demand for adept action is growing at a faster pace.
Many privacy groups such as EPIC have started off with mission to put pressure on online organizations to develop fair information practices for collection of data from online users. Privacy groups are demanding for a guarantee from internet companies that assure complete privacy of data collected from users. Strict restriction of usage of data for secondary purposes without the consent of users is also demanded.
Citizens all across the globe are being encouraged to sign the valuable Madrid privacy declaration. The declaration affirms that privacy is a fundamental human right.
With so much positive efforts by different privacy organization users can hope for better things to happen when they surf the net.
Tags: electronic privacy information center (EPIC), level of privacy, manages privacy setting, Social networking website