PRIVACY

AND THE INTERNET

PRIVACY AND THE INTERNET

“I feel like the government invented facebook to make privacy uncool” – Pete Holmes

What they know

  • Most of the things you use online on a daily basis collect information about you and sell it.
  • The information that they get makes you an advertising demographic. Men 18-24 get ads for meeting singles online, women whose status is “engaged” get ads for cribs and wedding planners.

GOOGLE

  • Google keeps all your information in one dossier. It gets your information from all google’s services; youtube, search and gmail. When you’re logged into gmail, whatever you do in another window is recorded and used. You search youtube for Michael Jordan, you get an ad in your inbox for Nike.

FACEBOOK

  • In 2011, NikCubrilovicrevealed that Facebook was tracking your internet activity even when you weren’t logged in. Log in once, and the cookie stays in your computer.
  • Third-party data collectors like Axciom and Epsilon can buy your user information from facebook; “names, ages, genders, hometown locations, languages, and a numbers of social connections (e.g., friends or followers).”
  • Facebook keeps an archive of what you’ve done, even if you undo it. If you de-friend somebody or unlike a page, that doesn’t erase the content.

TWITTER

  • Twitter keeps information about all tweets, locations and direct messages. Its iphone app stores and uses information from your contact book, so even if you’ve never tweeted at someone and they’re not on twitter, twitter has their information.

What’s the big deal?

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve done nothing wrong”. A lot of the ways internet companies store and use your information is mutually beneficial; everybody gets ads for things they’re interested in and companies are more likely to sell products to interested consumers.

Civil rights workers say it matters because of who gets to decidewhat counts as “nothing wrong”.

  1. Government subpoenas

When all your information is in one place, that dossier is useful to people trying to prove you’ve committed a crime. Internet companies can be subpoenaed like any other – the government can call on all your information and access it without your permission. This might be problematic when:

  • Your associations aren’t suspicious, but look it. A friend from five years ago has fallen in with an extremist crowd, and even though you’ve long since deleted him or hidden him from your feed, the government can now prove a link between you
  • You don’t agree with what the government thinks is “right”. If you live in a communist state and you’ve messaged people using the word “human rights,” you might not want the government to punish you for being a dissident
  • You belong to a group that is often wrongly accused of crimes. If you’re Islamic and you have family in Iran, that connection can look ‘suspicious’ to someone prejudiced who wants to prove you have terrorist connections.
  • You have political beliefs you want to keep private. Think back to 1950s America; if McCarthy had been able to subpoena the facebook messages of “leftists”, many more people might have been imprisoned for being communists – even if they weren’t.

QUESTION: in 2012, the FBI asked the US congress for the right to “listen in” to people’s facebook activity like they can do people’s phone calls – provided they have the appropriate permission (like a warrant). The FBI cited child pornography rings as the main reason they would use the ability to ‘listen in’.Do you think the government should have said yes?

  1. Employers and Insurers

Some people have personal information that they don’t want their employers to find out about. Their health, their politics, their family, are all things some people say are irrelevant to how they do their job, and no business of a major company. Facebook, google and twitter are able to store your private searches, including health symptoms. They could use this to fire or hire you.

  • If you google “persistent back pain”, health insurance companies could use this information to make your coverage more expensive – even if nothing was wrong with you. Your coverage would also be more expensive than someone who had a slipped disc but never googled it.
  • Prospective employers could find out you were having certain health tests or looking up certain symptoms. Would you want your boss knowing your health problems?
  • In 2010, Pamela Fink was hired from a Connecticut energy company for testing positive to a gene that predisposed her to a certain strain of breast cancer.
  • Your employer can watch you when you’re not at work. How much you drink, the rude things you tweet and the pages you like become reasonable things for an employer to know.
  • Paul Marshallsea is a 62-year old man who went on holiday while claiming to be on sick leave. While at the beach, he spotted a shark near some children and wrestled it away. The video of an old man wrestling a shark went viral, his company saw it, and fired him.

QUESTION: you and an equally qualified competitor are up for the same job. The company pays a data mining firm to find out how many friends and followers you each have. You have more, so you’re offered the job. Would you take it? Is “social influence” a reasonable hiring criterion?

  1. Political Speech

Protestors and dissidents want their information protected, especially when the government they’re criticising is the one who can seize all their data.

  • In 2012, Twitter reported that it had received 849 requests for data on users, including non-public data like the IP address of each tweet, direct messages, and since-deleted tweets. Most of these came from the US.
  • Malcom Harris is a New Yorker who was arrested as part of the Occupy protests in 2010. He was charged with disorderly conduct while marching on a bridge. The state asked Twitter to surrender his information because it thought his tweets could prove that he knew he wasn’t supposed to be on the bridge. Twitter was ordered to turn over the information, including his location for months before the offense.
  • In Iran and Egypt, protestors use twitter via proxy servers and under anonymous handles to organise actions against the government. These rebels think it is very important to their lives that they aren’t found out by the government they’re protesting against.

QUESTION: is there any “sort” of government that you’d give unequivocal permission to access your information?

  1. Fair Trials

Part of the reason juries are sequestered before major trials is to keep them unbiased – free of information that would prejudice them for or against the defendant. Lots of media coverage of trials (especially involving women) in the last few years have used information and pictures from social media to prove a spurious point

  • Amanda Knox, accused of murder as an exchange student in Italy, was pictured on myspace standing next to a canon during a family historical visit – the image was used to suggest she had a fondness for firearms
  • Casey Anthony’s former boyfriend posted a meme on myspace showing a man with his arm around a woman captioned “win her over with chloroform”

QUESTION: is there anything on your social media profile that would look bad if you were on trial for murder?

CLASHES IN DEBATES

Debates about restricting or allowing internet privacy centre on two pillars; what is justifiable in civil rights terms, and what provides the better results for law enforcers.

In your groups, discuss how you’d argue the answer to the following questions, and whether it aligns to the case for more or less privacy online.

  1. What’s the bigger harm: that an innocent person is imprisoned or that a guilty person gets away?
  2. Do you believe that in times of national crisis, we have to surrender some civil liberties?
  3. Does the internet tarnish the presumption of innocence? Is that necessarily a bad thing?