Privacy? – Does it exist online?
August 7, 2006 by Jason Bean
Filed under Computers
One of the items that’s definitely changed over the course of years on this earth is the concept of privacy. Used to be, the only way for personal news to spread about someone was if you shared a secret with someone that didn’t understand the concept of secrets.
Nowadays however it’s a whole different story isn’t it? With the recent news that AOL accidentally shared the browsing habits of its almost 700,000 subscribers, it seems you can’t do anything anymore without thinking someone else noticing, even though it took over a week for this to be noticed.
The link to the actual file, containing searches done by users whose personal ID are replaced with random numbers, is no longer available.
“This was a screw-up, and we’re angry and upset about it,” Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman, said. “It was an innocent-enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.”
Should we really expect privacy online though? The information released by AOL were the actually search patterns from a group of users. The only identification that was changed and replaced with a numeric identifier was the screenname.
Even though the internet is accessed from our private homes (most of the time), should the internet itself be considered private? Should we even try to segment access location to privacy? Should the internet be considered private if I access it from home or a personal computer on my own personal internet access. What if I access it from a personal computer while sitting in Starbucks? Does it matter if I’m on a business computer and using their access?
If the internet is just a collection of otherwise publicly available content, is it any different than going to the library? I would never assume that I could go into a library and check-out a bunch of books on terrorism, bomb-making, murder, etc., and not think at least the librarian, someone looking at the same shelf of books, or the management staff would be able to know my check-out history.
