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Who's Watching Out for Your Privacy?

The digital world is eroding our privacy. Every week, users post 3.5 billion pieces of information on Facebook. Twitter has over 100 million users. Google has over 900,000 servers. The content on social media sites reaches 80% of all internet users.

The data trail we leave behind on the internet is enormous.

“There has never been another time in history where privacy was under the kind of assault it is today,” said Rainey Reitman, activism director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Consumers have increasingly digital lives and they are developing an unfathomably large data trail every day.”

There is a perfect storm, Reitman says, involving digital lives, low-cost storage that allows companies to save everything, and the revenues that incent those companies to collect as much data as possible.

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Who's watching out for your privacy interests?

It's not just our individual postings that's the problem, it's the aggregation. The recent changes in privacy policy by Google and Facebook (with its new mandatory timeline) highlight the growing problem.

Once the data is out there, it's out. You can't put toothpaste back in a tube. Programs and frameworks are being developed to give users more control, but they aren't here yet. Examples: User-Managed Access and OAuth 2.0 (to secure mobile content.)

Other projects "include personal data stores, and Vendor Relationship Management, a project at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard" and a "do not track" standard.

I wish the Government was as concerned with protecting our privacy rights as it is with protecting Hollywood's copyrights.