Will Self Regulation Succeed?

Privacy problems have weighed down the internet for many years. In spite of the efforts to impose privacy laws, internet technology changes so rapidly that it quickly out-dates these legislations. It only takes a year or two after implementation before the privacy law is rendered “useless” by technology. There has to be a strategy that will always keep in pace with the present situation. Among other approaches, self regulation is the best solution to privacy problems.

Self regulation is the imposing on oneself some privacy related initiatives so as to avoid privacy invasion. It is restraining, even without the law, the use of collected personal information by companies or groups that gather such information. It is a deliberate action that follows a clear set of guidelines regarding how a certain company can protect privacy. This action could be joined in by website advertisers, ISPs, data brokers, social networking sites, apps providers, etc.


The U.S. started implementing self regulation programs in 1997. Since that time, this idea has been promoted by way of spreading information about it and encouraging websites to make it their obligation. However, past experiences showed that not one self-regulatory effort sustained success. Some were initiated but failed in one or more substantive ways. Others never got the opportunity to show what they had planned to offer before they disappeared. Though it is believed that self regulation can, in fact, be the answer to privacy problems, improvements in its implementation are needed. There is a strong view that consumers themselves have the greatest responsibility in defending their own privacy.

The majority of past self regulation programs, according to observation and evaluation, were poorly designed. Most of these did not saturate the market well, which means that many consumers did not really know they were there at all. There were websites that made profit their top priority and used self regulation only as a cover up.

There was one more thing that hampered the success of self regulation in the past. This was the lack of significant and independent involvement among privacy and consumer advocates in its development and oversight. The oversight of self regulation that is financed by industry could not be successful because industry would not want it to be successful. When privacy standards are profit-driven, they are bound to fail because money becomes more significant than privacy.

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Forget About Privacy

Social networking has become very popular, and it encourages more users to share personal information, even to those whom they do not know. These individuals want to expand their circle of “friends”, so they literally make themselves available to the internet community as a whole. Privacy protection no longer receives as high a priority as it used to have. As more modern technology becomes available, information sharing becomes easier and more exciting.

There are some unfamiliar facts behind Facebook users. Facebook has about 800 million users, and they can be classified into three categories. There are those users who sign on at least once a day. The second group is made up of those who sign on at least once a week. The last and third group includes those members who use it less often. There is a recently conducted telephone survey by Facebook of 2,000 adult respondents. This survey tried to look into how people view privacy in contrast with social networking.

The survey results showed that the more users make use of Facebook, the less they become concerned about privacy invasion. One respondent frankly said that he is not disturbed if people know about his online preferences or habits. This user admitted that he frequently uses Facebook more that once a day. He signs on either to get updates on his friends, or to play a popular Facebook-based game.

People who go online less often are more concerned about their privacy than those who log on more frequently. This was clearly shown in the results of the aforementioned survey. Respondents were asked if they were “very concerned” about their privacy. Taking the results together, the following were the figures gathered. Those who less frequently use Facebook comprised the highest number, at 39% of the respondents. One of the interesting results is that only 25% of those who use Facebook at least once a day said that they were “very concerned”.

Privacy concerns are the “offspring” of people who use Facebook more often. As they visit the networking site more often, they tend to share more information on the web. The availability of this kind of data online attracts many data mining companies. One can safely say that the tendency of users to easily share their information will continue. This is because social networks present more easy-to-use and stimulating features. Also, the social nature of man motivates him to connect with other people, sometimes without thinking of the consequences.


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Police DNA Profiling and Privacy

DNA technology has been beneficial in many fields of human society. The use of DNA in crime investigation has helped police departments for a number of years. From the unheard of to celebrated cases, identifying criminals through their DNA has made police officers’ work a lot easier. There is a recent privacy concern involving DNA profile collection. The police have cited privacy concerns about the move by officials to maintain a database of their officers’ own DNA.

Police officials have ordered the DNA testing of law enforcement personnel to rule out speculations that a police officer committed a sophisticated crime. The background of this unpopular order was the death of eight women in Louisiana in 2009. These deaths were labeled as serial killings, and the rumors spread when investigations showed the high degree of “workmanship” of the criminal. This resulted in all police officers in Louisiana agreeing to undergo testing. It finally turned out that the killer was not one of them.

To some officers, DNA collection is not something that could put their privacy at risk. They say that having a DNA file of police officers will save much time in conducting crime scene investigations as it would be easier to identify unknown genetic materials found at the scenes.

However, others feel that handing over DNA should not be done as easy as that. There are a lot of privacy concerns that should be clarified before officers give in to DNA testing. Those who are not sold on the idea say that there have to be safeguards put into place. It should be made clear to the DNA owner what would happen to it, making sure that it is treated with the utmost care.

Police unions have also issued their stand regarding this matter. The union officials have reminded their members about the possible consequences of allowing their DNA to be profiled. They said that there are yet no restrictions as to the storage of the DNA, so there is a high possibility of misuse and privacy problems.

In other parts of the world, countries like the United Kingdom and Australia have been maintaining DNA files of their officers for several years. It was the U.K. government that started such a system of keeping a database of criminal suspects way back in 1995. This same system was adopted by the U.S., which is believed to have the world’s largest DNA database of criminals today.

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Silk Web from Amazon

Collecting users’ personal information by websites is an old issue. It has existed for a long time, and it started off as a normal part of one’s online activity. For example, it was usual to supply your name and email address when you visited certain websites. Social networking sites would even ask users to provide even more sensitive personal information. Users freely shared this information to many web sites, without any idea of privacy implications.

As more personal data became available, targeted advertising was “invented” by online companies. They have built a user’s profile out of this accumulated data, especially regarding users’ product preferences. Without delay, privacy advocates told users to be more selective with the information that they share. Serious consumer education was done, but it was not enough to stop privacy issues and problems from getting worse.

As part of self-regulation, many websites provided their privacy policies without hiding anything. Clear options were given to users when it came to the sharing of personal information. There are companies that honestly tell their users why this information is being collected. This, however, did not stop some companies from introducing more subtle ways of gathering data.

A technology that may be new today is that of Amazon’s Silk Web Browser. This is not exactly new because Opera has used the same technology for a number of years. The Silk Web Browser is intended to be used with Amazon’s tablet, the Kindle Fire. This greatly improves the speed of internet surfing where users can experience optimized speed which is much better than their previous browsers. On its own servers, Amazon optimizes and compresses every page that users visit. This greatly increases speed and accelerates load times.

Privacy concerns again come onto the scene because of this. Obviously, Amazon can collect and store information about users’ surfing habits. Every page that they visit goes through Amazon’s servers – not one can escape. Amazon can then keep track of the kinds of sites visited, how much time users spend on them, and what they do there.

Because of privacy issues, Amazon was asked by Congress to answer some questions that they posed. Amazon initially explained that data collected will be anonymous. If users prefer not to use the feature, they can simply turn it off at anytime. This means that users will still be the ones to choose whether or not they will share their information with Amazon. If they want surfing at faster speeds, they can share the information. If they don’t mind the slower speeds, Amazon gives them the freedom to choose not to share.

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On Keeping Private

The presence of social networking has already spread through the internet. Among them are the three giants – Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. These have become well-known for their “Like”, “Follow” and “+1” buttons, respectively. Users can now read over a web page and click “Like”. This can be done with almost anything online. In short, many people do like what they read on the web. The problem is that users can be “followed” from every page that contains these sharing buttons even if they do not click them. The users then become targets of advertisements and, worse than this, they could lose a lot of privacy.

Users are being tracked without their knowledge and of course, without their consent. Information sharing technology is now so easy that codes can be embedded in almost every web page. One can observe its use by social networking companies. They do this by embedding codes with the file sharing buttons in a web page. Unknown to the user, the code works as he or she visits the page, recording his or her “presence”, and building a profile of his or her product preferences. In due time, the user becomes a target for advertisements based on the nature of pages that he or she usually opens.

Thanks should go out to Firefox and its new product extension, Priv3, that will allow your visits to be tracked by websites only when you permit them. This tool comes in handy when you are using Firefox. With this, those embedded codes will become powerless. This means that you can surf the web wherever you want without worrying about being tracked. Your presence will not be recorded unless you hit the “Like” button on Facebook or you tweet it with Twitter. Facebook or Twitter will only know that you have been on a particular page only if you hit the share buttons.

Users are guaranteed the same satisfaction even if they use Priv3. This capability will not affect one’s enjoyment of these networking sites. Priv3 is a technology that can go around many of those “blocks” in order to ensure the same high quality of enjoyment for users. Third party sites cannot track your online activities even if you keep logged on to social networking sites. It is because Priv3 prevents them from doing so unless you intentionally give permission. Priv3 comes free for everyone in order to keep their privacy.

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It's Time to be Anonymous

Internet users who have experience with using a proxy server have proven its many different benefits. One of these benefits is in terms of speed. My personal experience in this area helped me to better enjoy my online experience. After encountering problems with speed in uploading my blogs, I used an anonymous proxy, and it solved the problem.

At this time, more good things can come from using anonymous proxies, specifically bypassing filters. Basically, since a great deal of the spyware and junk that is sent to your computer is blocked, it saves you from the usual problems that users encounter. Although this can be remedied by using technical expertise, it is very burdensome to encounter the same problem over and over again.

Anonymous proxies also help in protecting personal information. Once personal information is gathered by sites, it can be used for marketing purposes. You can be saved from this problem because with an anonymous proxy, websites are blocked from gathering your personal information.

Sometimes there are corporations, institutions or schools that use filters to block users from viewing certain sites. This filter can be bypassed by an anonymous proxy. In order to do this, the anonymous proxy downloads the site onto its server. The user can then download the “blocked” site from the proxy server to his browser, thus getting around the “wall”.

Slow loading websites can easily find their way with a proxy. There are instances when the problem is not in the web hosting company. There are users, especially those with some technical expertise, that change their DNS server address but still can’t load the site faster. When this happens, the real culprit is narrowed down to the internet provider itself, due to bandwidth or network related problems. Luckily, this can be solved by using a proxy server.

The use of a proxy server is not yet popular with many internet users. A lot of them think that it requires some special skills to effectively take advantage of its usefulness. There is a need for more user education, or at least for the sharing of experiences. Little by little, more people will learn about its good uses and apply a proxy server to their advantage.

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Still on Children's Online Privacy

The problems regarding privacy have always been disturbing and lawmakers are looking for more ways to better protect children. The law, at present, has specified provisions that protect children when they surf online. Businesses are required to follow special rules concerning the collection and use of children’s personal information online. Still, lawmakers have a diverging stand on this issue. Those in the U.S. House Energy and Commerce are taking two sides on whether there is a need to craft special protection for kids 13 to 17 years old.

The 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has special provisions on child protection. It contains special requirements for websites that allow children under the age of 13 to access them. These websites cannot allow access if they do not have parental permission. They must have a parent’s permission before they can collect, use or disclose a child’s personal information. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sees the need to revise the meaning of personal information. The present state of technology should by now include Geo-location data and other identifiers, such as cookies.

When it comes to covering teenagers, there is also a divided opinion as to the extension of coverage under COPPA. In order to broaden its privacy legislation, privacy advocates are saying that Congress should include special protection for teens. There are at least two state representatives who proposed a more radical legislation. They want to bar websites from tracking all children when they surf online.

Also, the idea of a “web eraser” was brought up. This older proposition required businesses to provide a mechanism that allows teens to erase their online tracks. With this mechanism, all of the personal information a teenager would leave when they browse would be deleted as soon as they logged out of the site. This is extremely useful, especially in social networking sites, where teens give out most of their personal information.

Teenagers usually make online mistakes by providing too much personal information in the sites that they visit. They are surprised when these mistakes haunt them months, or even years later. A privacy advocate group sees this as their basis for saying that kids need more protection than they have right now.

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Users Will "Like" Facebook's Vanity Page

Among the names in social networking, Facebook is considered a giant. To give users an improved experience, it continuously introduces new features in its service. Sometimes, privacy issues get in the way, but the company manages to address these issues promptly. Millions of its users are satisfied, although sometimes, it receives criticisms from others. Nonetheless, Facebook keeps on discovering new ways of enhancing social networking, and it is succeeding. Just very recently, it rolled out its newest addition of making pages more accessible to its subscribers.

Facebook calls the newest addition a “vanity” or customized URL. As the name suggests, this page can be created by the user himself. Actually, this is not very new because it has been around for quite some time. However, it previously required the user to have at least 25 “Likes” on his or her newly created page before it could be registered. This was done in order to make sure that the page meets the standards of a suitable page.

For users who do not want a unique URL that is difficult to remember, the vanity URL is a great option. This type of page was once most wanted by those who promoted a cause or a brand. With this easier-to-remember option, the user can now select a shorter and unique username.

Users noticed that there was no prior announcement made of Facebook’s lifting or removing the 25-Like limit. One YouTube user discovered the change while he was trying to register using the Username registration process. Those who have existing pages with a small number of “Likes” will surely approve of this development. At present, the registration process no longer considers how many “Likes” they do or do not have.

This is the answer for users who work with brands, charities and other organizations. They can now easily share the pages that they have created “without having to share an ugly link”. In the end, Facebook will be the one that is benefited because it will increase participation on its service.

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GPS Vehicle Tracking Systems - Two Sides of the Story

For alleged violation of privacy, there is another case of an employee suing his former employer. Through the New York Civil Liberties Union, a state training manager, who was fired for time sheet violations, filed a lawsuit against the Labor Department. The fired employee, in his complaint, said that he was tracked with a GPS device that was placed in his personal car. According to a NYCLU lawyer, such use of GPS technology is an “unprecedented degree of government intrusion”.

The employee was quick to explain why he was fired from his post. He said that some employees were pressured to attend a prayer breakfast sponsored by a Governor. He was punished because he was the one who stood up for these employees. The Department of Labor belied his claims and said that the real cause was his improper filing of time sheets.

Why did the employee point out the use of the tracking device as his basis for complaint? The device was placed in his car so that his activities at work could be tracked. This came about after allegations arose that he claimed pay for hours when he was not doing his job. The period of surveillance was only supposed to cover his official working time. What happened was that the observation continued during evenings and weekends. On top of this, the employee’s vacation with his family did not escape the GPS device.

Because there were hints of abuse, an assistant attorney general explained that the employee’s alleged misbehavior at work is enough to merit tracking. The main purpose was to establish proof that the employee indeed committed a continuing misconduct. He, himself, claimed that he worked odd hours at his job. In order to find out if he was working these odd hours, there was a need to track him.

There was a ruling of a top court in New York in 2009 that before tracking a suspect, police must first get a court warrant. To get it, they must establish probable cause that without such action, the truth would be hard to come out. Now the courts are asking some questions as to the legal use of a GPS tracking device. How about if the device would only be used in the duration of an employee’s work hours?

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Is It Unconstitutional?

It seems that there is an issue building up regarding teacher-student communications. In Missouri, a state law prohibits teachers from having private communications with students over the internet. This triggered a teachers’ association to file a lawsuit naming the state, the governor and the attorney-general as defendants.

A Senator from Missouri defended the new state law, saying that it does not violate free speech or any other rights. These were the grounds stated in the teachers’ complaint, filed by the Missouri State Teachers’ Association. The Senator said that the law doesn’t stop any means of communication. It only prohibits private communication between educators and students who are minors. Teachers and students are allowed to communicate over the internet only if parents, administrators and the general public can view the internet site.

With the adoption of the law, schools are required to fine tune their policies to comply with the law. Teachers, through their association, reacted negatively, and said that banning this kind of contact is unconstitutional. Trying to explain their opposition, the teachers cited the vagueness and broadness of the act. According to them, there are no clear boundaries between which conduct is permitted and which is not. They added that the law seems to curtail the exercise of the First Amendment rights, including that of free speech and association among others.

The Senator who sponsored the bill wondered why the teachers are now against it. She said that these teachers even helped with the drafting of some of the language in the act. She commented that the teachers seem to be suing over their own work. In response, a spokesperson of the teachers’ association defended the group and explained how the opposition came about. He said that the teachers did not review the final language of the social media provisions.

Actually, this prohibition is just a part of the larger bill that is intended to prevent sexual abuse by teachers on students. Such incidence is sometimes rooted in a private relationship between them that eventually goes overboard. On the teachers’ side, they contend that the majority of their private online contact with students is education-related. In general, this kind of relationship can be helpful, especially for shy students or those who have difficulty with assignments.

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It's Better to Remain Anonymous

The issue of anonymity has not yet ended, especially for people who are placed under surveillance. It is possible that the scope will expand and include the anonymity of people in public places. The legality of using GPS devices in surveillance has triggered a controversy. This prompted the U.S. Supreme Court to hear arguments and look into the possibility of expanding the range of privacy.

One of the cases that used a GPS device without warrant was that of a suspected drug dealer. The police placed the device in his car and tracked his movements for a month. Collected data was used to convict him of conspiring to sell cocaine. Because there was no valid warrant, it is possible that it was a case of unreasonable search. There is the issue of whether the police action constituted a breach of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

Americans might be expecting an end to their anonymity if the Court upholds the decision that such kinds of searches are legal. There is no need to say that people have enjoyed the privilege of, or rather the right to, privacy. Regardless of location, people can now be placed under surveillance as others would see fit, at any time. This is based on the premise that the fact that a person is in a public place, he is no longer “private”. Also, the use of existing tracking technology is not being done to curtail privacy, but to make surveillance more effective.

In August 2010, a U.S. Court of Appeals Judge issued a contradictory opinion. According to him, a reasonable person would not want all his public movements being watched all the time. He further said that surveillance technology has improved considerably, especially with the present GPS capability. Americans are expecting that the Court would accept the Judge’s logic so that they can still enjoy the same degree of anonymity.

For example, in the past, the police used beepers to follow a car. With GPS technology, it is much easier and convenient to track a person. Today, anyone can be placed under surveillance 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without the need to physically follow his or her movements. It can be expected that one day, a person’s privacy will most likely be measured in terms new surveillance limits.

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The Cookie Law and Privacy

The implementation of a cookie law has been enforced by the European Union on its member states. After thorough study, this directive on internet privacy was signed in November 2009. This required websites to give users options before they could install cookies on any individual’s computer.

However, the specific requirement for cookie opt-out has yet to be clarified even after two years of the law’s presence. For those that implemented the changes, the confusion lies on what would really constitute an opt-out requirement. In order to clarify things, a recent meeting was held among the group members, where there was a divided opinion among members. Some said that the user’s action to visit the website is in itself an indication of their agreement with the website’s practices. On the other hand, those who are directly involved with the implementation believe that there should be a clear opt-in process.

Some are not sold to the idea of the directive because it will cause a little disruption to users. Nowadays, websites have sponsors that would automatically store cookies on a visitor’s computer. When the directive is implemented, pop-up windows would recurrently appear on the user’s screen. These windows would be asking permission to store cookies. This becomes very cumbersome for a website that has nine companies. There would be nine pop-up windows that would ask if the user would allow cookies to be stored in his or her computer.

In general, member states are doing their best to meet the requirements of the directive. The Safe Harbor framework has placed the U.S. in the position of doing self-certification. With this, U.S. companies can certify that they meet the EU rules every time they deal with EU customers only. At present, there were about 3,000 companies who were certified, but there are some that need to update their certifications.

Aside from the privacy of internet users, there is the other side of the story. Congress cannot yet see a complete picture of the directive’s impact on online advertisers. This group might get even because there seems to be control of personal freedom and not just users’ privacy. Whatever the final scenario would be still remains to be seen.

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