Internet Privacy - Web Giants and Data Management

Internet Privacy – Web Giants and Data Management

Internet privacy concerns the personally identifiable and other data a user willingly or inadvertently gives out. Privacy is a broad topic and though there are many definitions, it is very difficult to draw lines between the wrong and right usage of such data a user provides. Frackman et al (2002), states that the broad nature of privacy does not differentiate information that has been provided voluntarily or which has been obtained without consent. Hence there are many organizations that are advocates of protecting consumers' privacy and actively promote and if necessary help take legal action against organizations which abuse privacy.

In modern world relevance and usage of internet has become a vital part of everyday life. Everything from leisure, business transactions to interactions with government are facilitated over internet. Even though there are laws that are designed to protect privacy, the vague nature of the definition of privacy hinders such protection.

Consider internet search and advertising giant Google or social networking giant Facebook. The nature of their business means every user, with every transaction will give out data. Personal data, like any other, can be shared or sold. Should these companies sell such data? Should they dig into personal data? Should they monitor user activities? Should they report activities like pornography to proper authorities? Should they allow governments to tap into user data without consent from users? Should they make profit out of such data?

These are some of the issues organizations and users alike, face every day. As Kizza (2010) states "the danger with information matching is that there is no limit to what one can do with the collected information, and no one knows what the profiles built from the matched information will be used for and by whom."

Consider Google. As a search engine and provider of other online services such as web mail and social networking, they accrue a lot of personal data. Every time a user does a search even without signing in to Google's network, information about the user including IP address, User-Agent and other information are sent. If the user chooses to register on their network, users are requested to provide personally identifiable information such as first and last name, date of birth, city/country and so on. As soon as Google receives these data, issues of ethical and legal nature arises. The big question becomes what to do with these data?

Looking at good use of such information, it facilitates Google to provide more relevant search results to the user and storing this information allows Google to provide more relevant and accurate results based on user's history. It also enables the company to allow users to customize their usage of Google, choose to opt-in or out of services and so forth.

But when