Series: Your Online Life — Part 3: Your Right to Privacy and Why You Won’t Get it

22 Jul
2010


The Internet Privacy Act was signed into law in 1995 by the President Bill Clinton. Wait. No it wasn’t.

It’s a fic­ti­tious act cre­ated by web­sites who want to invade, exploit, and share the infor­ma­tion that you should have the right of pri­vacy to. Such sites even post this false warn­ing:

If you are affil­i­ated with any gov­ern­ment, anti-​piracy group or any other related group, or were for­mally a worker of one you CANNOT enter this web site, can­not access any of its files and you can­not view any of the HTML files.

If you enter this site you are not agree­ing to these terms and you are vio­lat­ing code 431.322.12 of the Internet Privacy Act signed by Bill Clinton in 1995 and that means that you CANNOT threaten our ISP(s) or any person(s) or com­pany stor­ing these files, and can­not pros­e­cute any person(s) affil­i­ated with this page which includes fam­ily, friends or indi­vid­u­als who run or enter this web site (source: wikipedia)

There are no true reg­u­la­tions in place to make sure that your infor­ma­tion is kept safe on the inter­net.

This is why web­sites like Facebook can have so much lee­way in how much they can share about you. Its pri­vacy issues only became an issue after users began to notice how their per­sonal info was being used.

Google and Twitter have also joined to cre­ate search­able tweets. Meaning if some­one searches your twit­ter name on Google they can read all your tweets.

Even those who have their account sta­tus set to “pro­tect my tweets” have had their pri­vacy vio­lated result­ing in an action against Twitter from the Federal Trade Commission accord­ing to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Sites like Foursquare, which is a geolo­ca­tion game tracks where you are when you check in from var­i­ous loca­tions so your “friends” can know where you are at any given time. However, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in Foursquare’s pri­vacy make it pos­si­ble for “chance” encoun­ters with all sorts of peo­ple leav­ing you in poten­tial jeop­ardy.

Websites have been started that exploit this ven­er­a­bil­ity. Sites such as Avoidr which uses Foursquare’s check-​ins to help you avoid peo­ple you don’t want to run in to and PleaseRobMe​.com which is sup­pos­edly designed to raise aware­ness about over­shar­ing.

Blizzard Entertainment who is behind the pop­u­lar World of Warcraft games recently planned to incor­po­rate their Real ID™ sys­tem that would show users real names to other users in accor­dance with its part­ner­ship with Facebook. That plan has now been rescinded “at this time” after a pub­lic out­cry over the change yet its pri­vacy pol­icy did not remove men­tion of the Real ID™.

These are a few exam­ples of how inter­net pri­vacy does not exist. Don’t be fooled into think­ing that just because a site promises to keep your infor­ma­tion pri­vate it will.

The inter­net is the world’s largest vir­tu­ally unmanned data­base of pri­vate infor­ma­tion that has the pos­si­bil­ity of reach­ing the scope of prac­ti­cally every per­son with inter­net access on the planet.

Our best defense is to pro­tect our­selves and avoid ques­tion­able and even rep­utable sites that put our infor­ma­tion at risk.

Next: The final post of the series: Your Online Life — Part 4: Shouldn’t be your Focal Point.

Thanks for read­ing,

Literary Nobody

Toya Bryant has written 193 article(s) for this site

Toya Bryant aka Literary Nobody is a Freelance Writer/Blogger who promotes positive thinking and actions within the community and the family. She also writes about the positives and negatives of technology, internet security and social media.

  • http://twitter.com/Jangaler Jan Rider Newman

    I don’t assume I’d have any real pri­vacy even if I weren’t online. Banks, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, schools, gro­cery stores, and so on use com­put­ers. All the infor­ma­tion they col­lect and share among them­selves is out there some­where, wait­ing for a hacker, or an employee who pushes the wrong but­ton — oops. There are no hid­ing places, no real ways to dis­con­nect, although of course we make our­selves more vul­ner­a­ble as we put more and more of our own infor­ma­tion on line.

  • http://www.literarynobody.com/ Literary Nobody

    Thanks for the com­ment Jan. I agree that pri­vacy is scarce no mat­ter what. The inter­net increases that. I find it amaz­ing that there is no safe­guards in this regard. We are very vul­ner­a­ble.



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