A Pragmatic Approach to E-Privacy

Paper Summary:

The author of this paper feels that the general approach to addressing privacy on the internet has led to a debate between government and self-regulation with technology only providing a modest recourse. He feels that any attempt to address privacy concerns will depend on the very institutions that have been pitted against each other. This papers evaluates the rationale for each of these approaches and concludes by presenting a interdependence model for regulating privacy on the internet.

From the Paper:

"Before its demise two years back, Toysmart.com made a standard promise to its customers: The Company's privacy statement assured customers that Toysmart would never sell information registered at the site, including children's names and birth dates. But in the liquidation proceedings, Toysmart.com declared that its customer lists were business assets and therefore it was allowed to sell the lists to a "qualified buyer" that would be a successor-in-interest to the customer information (Doherty, 2001). DoubleClick is an Internet advertising company that tracks Internet user behavior in order to better target banner ads. Not only did DoubleClick deceive consumers by claiming in multiple earlier privacy policies that information collected would remain anonymous, the company also unfairly collected and linked information about Internet users without their knowledge or control. Elensys Inc., a Woburn, Massachusetts company had been secretly collecting the pharmacy records of millions of consumers from 15,000 pharmacies nationwide a deed which won them the infamous Big Brother Award. The above examples are just one of the few brought out in the public light revealing the utter disdain with which corporations deal with consumers personal data. These organizations while raking in huge profits bombard consumers with massive loads of unwanted spam while strategically selling on data to unknown third parties, where it gets aggregated along with other databases for the purpose of online profiling. The rapid advances in new intelligence gathering technologies, and their almost limitless spectrum of functions, creates a buoyant surveillance economy. It is known that on an average, each adult in the developed world is located in 200 computer databases (Davies, Unknown). Such facts present an increasingly dangerous ground for privacy conscious consumers to tread on."

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