Privacy online

I n the recent literature on privacy and technology, considerable attention has been paid to online privacy issues and concerns. For example, a number of books and scholarly journal articles, as well as reports in the popular press, have examined" the impact of certain online activities involving the Internet and the World Wide Web for personal privacy. In this essay, I use the expression "online activities" to refer to those activities involving both the Web in particular and the Internet in general. And I use the tern "Internet" in its most generic sense to include protocols such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Gopher as well as the Web (HTTP). Our concern in this study is with privacy issues arising from online activities involving any of these Internet protocols. Note, however, that we will not be concerned with privacy issues peculiar to privately owned computer systems and networks (such as privacy issues involving employee email). Nor will we be concerned with privacy issues involving the use of digital telephony, including devices such as cell phones. Instead, we will limit our analysis of privacy issues to those concerns arising from certain user activities involving Internet resources. One interesting question to considermand one that is often overlooked in the contemporary privacy literature-is: To what extent has the Internet itself generated new privacy issues, and to what extent has it merely exacerbated existing ones? It will be argued that in most cases, the privacy issues frequently associated with the Internet are issues which have their genesis in technologies that predate the Internet. It will also be shown, however, that at least two of the privacy issues currently associated with the Internet are such that they would not have arisen without the availability of certain Internet tools and techniques. Issues of the latter type are labeled Internet-specific and are contrasted with Internet-enhanced privacy issues. Another interesting, and perhaps more important, question is: How can we best resolve Internet-related privacy issues, regardless of whether such issues are unique to, or merely exacerbated by, Internet technology? In the final section of this study, we consider some policy proposals recently put forth to address current online privacy issues involving certain Internet activities. We begin our study with a brief look at the concept of privacy.