Privacy

The Tact of Social Media Monitoring

Focuses on opportunities for network conversation analysis to elicit valuable information about the social context of brand mentions. The challenge for marketers lies in how to use this information in a way that preserves trust with customers.

Privacy in the United States: Some Implications for Design

In the United States, "privacy" largely centers on the degree to which an individual feels in control over the accessibility of whatever she or he feels is "private." I explore this conceptualization of privacy, drawing primarily on the work of U.S. scholars as well as an ethnographic study including 74 mostly middle and upper-middle class individuals who were interviewed from June 2001-December 2002. I examine the ways in which participants try to achieve privacy as they pursue the principle of "selective disclosure and concealment." I conclude that 1) the affordance of such selectivity may be a key element when it comes to objects, environments, services, and technological systems designed for the U.S., 2) it is important to use familiar (local), easily understood and manipulated mechanisms and metaphors when designing for privacy, 3) notions of privacy may vary widely, and if privacy is an important design consideration, deeper, local understandings of what it means and how it is normally achieved are necessary, and 4) at times, designers might benefit from focusing on the ways in which design features give preference to some stakeholders' interests at the expense of others' via the provision or denial of traditional forms of privacy.

Anonymous Cowards, Avatars, and the Zeitgeist: Personal Identity in Flux: Part I

Governments and large organizations, with legal and administrative concerns like taxation and security typically address the practical aspects of identity we experience on a daily basis—issuing IDs and credentials and deciding the mechanisms for their verification. This division of responsibilities for defining and executing the construct of personal identity is nearly as old as the mind/body schism at the heart of Western culture.

Ethics and Information

This article gives a detailed encyclopedic overview of the many areas and concepts that fall within the domain of information ethics. Thus, it offers brief synoptic remarks on, for example, privacy and peer review, rather than in-depth discussions of these topics, many of which have generated thousands of studies, articles, and monographic treatments.

No Place to Play: Current Employee Privacy Rights in Social Networking Sites

Employers have legitimate business interests in monitoring workplace Internet use: to minimize legal exposure, to increase productivity, and to avoid proprietary information loss. Since employees arguably have no expectation of privacy in their work on employers' computers, there are few grounds for complaint if they are disciplined for straying from corporate policy on such use. In this heavily scrutinized work environment, it is no small wonder that employees crave a place to unwind and play “electronically” after hours. In unprecedented numbers, America's workers are visiting online social networking sites (OSNs) and posting tidbits that might not be considered job-appropriate by their employer. Here, many postulate they do have an expectation of and indeed a right to privacy, especially in arenas used to express personal freedoms and exercise individualism that has no bearing on their workplace.

Know Privacy

In this project we examined the common practices among website operators of collecting, sharing and analyzing data about their users. We attempted to identify practices which may be deceptive or potentially harmful to users’ privacy and we make recommendations for changes in industry practice or government regulations accordingly. We compared industry practices with users’ expectations of privacy, identified points of divergence, and developed solutions for them.

Online Privacy as Legal Safeguard: The Relationship Among Consumer, Online Portal, and Privacy Policies

Several surveys attest to growing public concerns regarding privacy, aggravated by the diffusion of information technologies. A policy of self-regulation that allows individual companies to implement self-designed privacy statements is prevalent in the United States. These statements rarely provide specific privacy guarantees that personal information will be kept confidential. This study provides a discourse analysis of such privacy statements to determine their overall efficacy as a policy measure. The in-depth analysis of privacy statements revealed that they offer little protection to the consumer, instead serving to authorize business practices which allow companies to profit from consumer data. Using public good theory as a foundation, policy implications are discussed.

Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence

Not all Facebook users appreciated the September 2006 launch of the `News Feeds' feature. Concerned about privacy implications, thousands of users vocalized their discontent through the site itself, forcing the company to implement privacy tools. This essay examines the privacy concerns voiced following these events. Because the data made easily visible were already accessible with effort, what disturbed people was primarily the sense of exposure and invasion. In essence, the `privacy trainwreck' that people experienced was the cost of social convergence.

Bloggers' Alert: Confidentiality and Disclosure in the Workplace

First it was e-mail messages, next it was PDA messaging, and now it is blogs. These networking tools are all widely used by employees. They also sometimes become a source of contentious litigation when employers become concerned over the risk of corporate liability and public disclosure of confidential information that these new technologies pose.

Privacy Laws and Communication

With the advent of the Internet and the ability to send personal information to many places in very little time, privacy has become an important issue for businesses across the globe. How to retain the free flow of information without violating an individual’s right to privacy is a difficult balance to strike and one that different countries approach in various ways.

Workplace Surveillance and Managing Privacy Boundaries

According to communication privacy management (CPM) theory, people manage the boundaries around information that they seek to keep private. How does this theory apply when employees are monitored electronically? Using data from 154 face-to-face interviews with employees from a range of organizations, the authors identified various ways organizations, employees, and coworkers describe electronic surveillance and the privacy expectations, boundaries, and turbulence that arise. Privacy boundaries are established during new-employee orientation when surveillance is described as coercive control, as benefiting the company, and/or as benefiting employees. Correlations exist between the surveillance-related socialization messages interviewees remember receiving and their attitudes. Although little boundary turbulence appeared, employees articulated boundaries that companies should not cross. The authors conclude that CPM theory suppositions need modification to fit the conditions of electronic surveillance.

Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation

Most e-mail obfuscation techniques I've tried tend to be bothersome and time-consuming to implement because they have to be applied to each and every e-mail address that you want to protect. Most require you to use lengthy inline script elements and inline event handlers. They may also invalidate your markup.

Privacy Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

For those of us who work with computers, the value of identifying ourselves to Web sites is increasingly obvious: no more retyping our name and address information, less need to memorize dozens of log-in passwords and paths to specific Web pages, less spam, and fewer irrelevant banner ads. But even those of us who appreciate the value of sharing some personal information with Web sites and those who run them are growing increasingly uncomfortable with the potential for abuse inherent in having information on our identities and preferences broadly available.

The Rhetoric of Misdirection in Corporate Privacy-Policy Statements

U.S. businesses wish to continue to profit by collecting personal information from their website visitors, yet they fear that the practice both alienates visitors and exposes them both to legal problems from U.S. authorities and business sanctions from data-privacy authorities in Europe and Canada. This dilemma is reflected in the typical corporate privacy-policy statement, which is full of misleading and deceptive rhetoric intended to cover up the gap between the company's privacy policy and the image it wishes to project.

Guiding Principles for Providing "Remember Me" Personalization

As we set out to enhance personalization on Marriott.com, we realized we needed guidelines to inform our thinking and shape our decisions, particularly decisions related to customer privacy. Our earlier user research revealed the need for greater personalization and helped us understand customer attitudes towards privacy. From there, we sought to build customer trust and loyalty by addressing concerns about privacy and security in every aspect of the user experience. In creating the Guiding Principles outlined here, we conducted a thorough analysis of eight major websites and then merged the findings with what we already knew. These principles apply specifically to 'remember me' personalization.

Hidden Information for All to See

While it takes special forensic tools to access most of the hidden information in computers, some of it is in plain view and can be seen without forensic tools. This article is about one of the 'plain view' instances: information Microsoft Word saves about you, your company, and the topic you are writing about, all of which can be seen by anyone who has access to your document.

Concerned About RFID Tags? You Should Be

Gives a brief overview about how RFID tags work and examines the threat RFID tags pose to consumers and privacy in general.

Email in the Workplace: Employees Perceive Email Differently than Employers

Argues that employees' misunderstanding of email in the workplace has in part stemmed from employers not being direct about the need to monitor it. By being clear and direct, employers can possibly reduce misuse and ultimately the need for such intrusive email monitoring.

A to Z(ee) with P3P

When you build websites that rely on cookies and they are expected to work with privacy settings other than default, you’ll have to deal with P3P. Read on to find out about the cornerstones of the Platform for Privacy Preferences, and get your hands dirty with an example guiding you from empty hands to a complete basic implementation.

Cookies: Just a Little Data Snack

To read the New York Times Web site, you must open a free user account and log in each time you visit. That means yet another user name and password to remember. Fortunately, if you always use the same computer, you can set up your account so that you're logged in automatically whenever you connect to the site. The site does that by using cookies -- another of those silly-sounding bits of programmers' vocabulary that have crept into mainstream coverage of the Internet. But over the past year or so, this practice has become controversial because some people view it as an invasion of privacy. Others have bought into rumors or read inaccurate press reports suggesting that cookies threaten the security of their hard drives.

Privacy

Privacy is especially difficult to define because it means different things to different people. Each of us has our own privacy needs. Women often have different privacy concerns than men; asking a 9-year-old child his age over the Net has different privacy implications from asking the same question of a middle-aged adult. A question that may not be seen as violating our privacy in one situation could have that appearance in another.

Anonymous Personalization: Part I

Personalization versus privacy. It's not a question of which will ultimately prevail. But rather, how can we have both?

The Users Charter

The following is an attempt to outline a charter of rights for the user of web applications. They are, of course, unenforceable but compliance with them would represent best practice in the design of user-centred interfaces. More significantly, any violation of the charter would indicate the presence of significant usability problems detrimental to the user experience. And failing to address the requirements of the user leads to frustration, irritation and consequently lost business.

Privacy 101

It's a fact that some businesses and organizations do not take privacy very seriously. However, the truth is that privacy of confidential customer information is mandated by law — many laws, actually. There are more privacy laws than we can discuss here. But...

Big Brother in the Boardroom

The lives and antics of the housemates of the reality TV show Big Brother may have drawn our attention, but do we need to concern ourselves with the activities of a real Big Brother? Has George Orwell’s vision of electronic surveillance and mind control come true in the new millennium? Many people believe that Big Brother is alive and well and coming to a computer network near you. In fact, he could already be living with you in your office, watching your every move on the Internet. their rights by monitoring their employees: They need to ensure that their employees are not wasting time browsing adult Web sites, or sending and receiving personal e-mail. Hence the proliferation of sophisticated server software, which can perform all manner of filtering tasks automatically.

Privacy Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

For those of us who regularly visit certain Web sites, the value of identifying ourselves to those sites grows quickly and painfully obvious: Accepting cookies from a Web site could potentially eliminate endlessly retyping our personal information, memorizing yet another login password, repeatedly re-customizing how a site responds to us, and enduring irrelevant information such as untargeted banner ads. But even those of us who appreciate the value of sharing personal information with Web sites and their designers have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the potential for abuse inherent in having confidential information about our identities and preferences broadly available. Even if a site isn't cracked and our private information stolen--always a risk on the Web--the site owner is bound to sell the information to commercial mailing lists, thereby guaranteeing us a lifetime supply of junk mail. Worst of all, we won't even be able to burn that junk on cold winter nights to stay warm.

Internet Privacy: European and American Approaches

Privacy is a concern to all who use the Internet. This article will examine the different approaches that European and American governments have taken toward Internet privacy.

Company E-mail and Internet Policies

More and more companies are monitoring e-mail and Internet use by employees. How do they do it, why do they do it, and is it really legal? This article explores the privacy, harassment and criminal concerns raised by employees' use of the Internet and e-mail. Plus, two forms: E-mail/Internet Usage Policy and Software Policy.

Respecting User Privacy

We'll look at why privacy is a much-abused buzzword. The e-commerce industry has failed miserably to produce consumer confidence; not because we haven't tried to do so, but because we've done it through dog-and-pony shows, rather than real respect for personal data. It is particularly crucial to note, in this context, that not everything that is legal is acceptable. We discuss the basic principles of an effective privacy policy: It must be short and readable, and the customer must like it.