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Privacy Piracy
By Tom Thomas
Director of Technical Services

With the advent of the Information Age and the culmination of the Internet, privacy issues have become the focus of many citizens and politicians alike - highlighted by the recent lawsuit filed by Michigan Attorney General, Jennifer Granholm, against several commercial Web sites. The lawsuit claims that these Websites in question track people's activities on the web to develop profiles of the users without informing the Web site's guests. These situations and others similar to this case bring the privacy issue to forefront of the news again, but the struggle for privacy has been ongoing for decades.
The increased transportation of people and information has been deteriorating Nature's natural tendencies towards privacy by making it more difficult to be alone - the natural state of privacy. Sixty years ago, a U.S. social philosopher, Lewis Mumford, eloquently illustrated this dilemma when he exclaimed, "Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet." Similar concerns were already being address a decade earlier when in 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis prophetically wrote:
Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate of occurrences of the home…"
In recent years, such "ways" have been developed through the use of electronic communication that in its barest form is void of privacy. A Federal Trades Commission report in 1997 on privacy on the Internet speaks of concerns similar to Justice Brandeis' seventy years earlier, warning that the proliferation of readily available personal information could jeopardize personal privacy and facilitate fraud and deception.
Obviously, the threat to our privacy of personal information is present. However, there are several avenues to take in which to protect your privacy. Through technological means, social policies and simple, homegrown prudent practices our privacy can be secured and kept safe.
Many of these technologies, policies and practices are already in place on the Internet making your current Internet travels safe. Still, as Attorney General Granholm will attest, more work and vigilance is needed - if for no other reason than to maintain the security of privacy of personal information against the ever-expanding information technologies. Over the next several issues of RemARQ's, the methods currently in place and those that are being proposed for ensuring privacy on the Internet will be discussed in length.
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