Data Privacy

What is Data Privacy?
Privacy as a whole, encompasses numerous concepts ranging from: freedom of thought, the right to your own body, freedom from surveillance, to the freedom to choose what sorts of data can be collected about us. These large entities occur in both the public and the private sector. In the days of the ever increasing integration between the real world and the internet, the ethics of data privacy, anonymity, and other concepts have grown in importance. Data privacy--like anything, has both its positives and negatives. In short, data privacy deals with how any third party, whether its an individual or a large-scale organization utilizes the data collected.

History
In the United States, the concept of privacy corresponds to the concept of individualism--which stemmed from the ideas created during the enlightenment period. Individual privacy was not mentioned in legal documents.In fact, legal documents such as, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not explicitly mention of individual privacy. It was not until 1979, when congress passed the Privacy Act of 1974 that recognized privacy specifically in law. However, as technology progressed and more personal data becomes part of the internet data privacy has become important. In the United States there is no singular, comprehensive, centralized law that regulates the collection and use of private data. Instead it relies on a sectoral approach which is a collection of laws that define what entities can or cannot do with private user data. These laws oftentimes overlap and contradict one another and in addition to these laws, there are guidelines created by various federal agencies which while they do have some sort of accountability and enforcement measures in place, they do not have the power of the law behind them. As such, with such a patchwork of laws and regulations have lead to much controversy over the years with the most recent is the repeal of Net Neutrality as well as the fallout from the ongoing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal. These breaches in data privacy have lead some users take matters into their own hands, sometimes creating guidelines and online tools which protects the privacy of users.

Anonymity
As the internet becomes indispensable tool in daily life--it’s important to understand anonymity and how to remain anonymous online. There are a variety of reasons as to why an individual would want to be anonymous, but the main reason is to protect their privacy. Anonymity allows users to post online, as unidentified individuals. Remaining unidentified allows freedom of expression, while protecting the user. However, anonymity is a double-edged sword. The misuse of anonymity threatens the users’ privacy and safety. In order to remain safe online, these factors need to be taken into consideration.

Shared Data
Every day we access internet, open an application, use google maps to navigate to our destination, not knowing that we are sharing our data through these platforms. When we search for something on the internet or click a certain ad, our information is stored by companies – Facebook, Google, etc. This data is then analyzed to get specific information about that individual. Once we are connected to the internet, we have no privacy of our own.

People think they are safe while browsing the internet or using an application on their smartphone, but ignorant of the amount of information they share by clicking the click of a button or giving permission to app to access their location, contact, camera, etc. We all should think twice before taking certain steps to avoid our information being stolen and used against us.