Privacy and technology

Advertisement for dial telephone service available to delegates to the 1912 Republican convention in Chicago. A major selling point of dial telephone service was that it was "secret", in that no operator was required to connect the call.

As technology has advanced, the way in which privacy is protected and violated has changed with it. In the case of some technologies, such as the printing press or the Internet, the increased ability to share information can lead to new ways in which privacy can be breached. It is generally agreed ^[7] that the first publication advocating privacy in the United States was the article by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harvard L.R. 193 (1890), that was written largely in response to the increase in newspapers and photographs made possible by printing technologies.^[8]

New technologies can also create new ways to gather private information. For example, in the U.S. it was thought that heat sensors intended to be used to find marijuana growing operations would be acceptable. However in 2001 in Kyllo v. United States(533 U.S. 27) it was decided that the use of thermal imaging devices that can reveal previously unknown information without a warrant does indeed constitute a violation of privacy.^[9]

Generally the increased ability to gather and send information has had negative implications for retaining privacy. As large scale information systems become more common, there is so much information stored in many databases worldwide that an individual has no practical means of knowing of or controlling all of the information about themselves that others may have hold or access. Such information could potentially be sold to others for profit and/or be used for purposes not known to or sanctioned by the individual concerned. The concept of information privacy has become more significant as more systems controlling more information appear. Also the consequences of privacy violations can be more severe. Privacy law in many countries has had to adapt to changes in technology in order to address these issues and, to some extent, maintain privacy rights. But the existing global privacy rights framework has also been criticized as incoherent and inefficient. Proposals such as the APEC Privacy Framework have emerged which set out to provide the first comprehensive legal framework on the issue of global data privacy.

[edit]Privacy and the Internet

Main article: Internet privacy

The Internet has brought new concerns about privacy in an age where computers can permanently store records of everything: "where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever," writes law professor and author Jeffrey Rosen.^[10]

This currently has an effect on employment. Microsoft reports that 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals now do online research about candidates, often using information provided by search engines, social-networking sites, photo/video-sharing sites, personal web sites and blogs, and Twitter. They also report that 70 percent of U.S. recruiters have rejected candidates based on internet information.^[10] This has created a need by many to control various online privacy settings in addition to controlling their online reputations, both of which have led to legal suits against various sites and employers.^[10]

The ability to do online inquiries about individuals has expanded dramatically over the last decade. Facebook for example, as of July 2010, was the largest social-networking site, with nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, who upload over 25 billion pieces of content each month. Twitter has more than 100 million registered users. The Library of Congress recently announced that it will be acquiring — and permanently storing — the entire archive of public Twitter posts since 2006, reports Rosen.^[10]

According to some experts, many commonly used communication devices may be mapping every move of their users. Senator Al Franken has noted the seriousness of iPhones and iPads having the ability to record and store users locations in unencrypted files,^[11] although Apple denied doing so.^[12]

Andrew Grove, co-founder and former CEO of Intel Corporation, offered his thoughts on internet privacy in an interview in 2000:^[13]

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that's a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn't the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.

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