Information privacy

This describes the ability to control what information one reveals about oneself over cable television, and who can access that information. For example, third parties can track IP TV programs someone has watched at any given time. "The addition of any information in a broadcasting stream is not required for an audience rating survey, additional devices are not requested to be installed in the houses of viewers or listeners, and without the necessity of their cooperations, audience ratings can be automatically performed in real-time."[7]

In the United Kingdom in 2012, the Education Secretary Michael Gove described the National Pupil Database as a "rich dataset" whose value could be "maximised" by making it more openly accessible, including to private companies. Kelly Fiveash of The Register said that this could mean "a child's school life including exam results, attendance, teacher assessments and even characteristics" could be available, with third-party organizations being responsible for anonymizing any publications themselves, rather than the data being anonymized by the government before being handed over. An example of a data request that Gove indicated had been rejected in the past, but might be possible under an improved version of privacy regulations, was for "analysis on sexual exploitation".[8]

Information about a person's financial transactions, including the amount of assets, positions held in stocks or funds, outstanding debts, and purchases can be sensitive. If criminals gain access to information such as a person's accounts or credit card numbers, that person could become the victim of fraud or identity theft. Information about a person's purchases can reveal a great deal about that person's history, such as places they have visited, whom they have contact with, products they have used, their activities and habits, or medications they have used. In some cases, corporations may use this information to target individuals with marketing customized towards those individual's personal preferences, which that person may or may not approve.[8]

The ability to control the information one reveals about oneself over the internet, and who can access that information, has become a growing concern. These concerns include whether email can be stored or read by third parties without consent, or whether third parties can continue to track the websites that someone visited. Another concern is if websites one visited can collect, store, and possibly share personally identifiable information about users.

The advent of various search engines and the use of data mining created a capability for data about individuals to be collected and combined from a wide variety of sources very easily.[9][10][11] The FTC has provided a set of guidelines that represent widely accepted concepts concerning fair information practices in an electronic marketplace called the Fair Information Practice Principles.

To avoid giving away too much personal information, emails should be encrypted. Browsing of web pages as well as other online activities should be done trace-less via "anonymizers", in case those are not trusted, by open-source distributed anonymizers, so called mix nets, such as I2P or Tor – The Onion Router. VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are another "anonymizer" that can be used to give someone more protection while online. This includes obfuscating and encrypting web traffic so that other groups cannot see or mine it.[12]

Email isn't the only internet content with privacy concerns. In an age where increasing amounts of information is online, social networking sites pose additional privacy challenges. People may be tagged in photos or have valuable information exposed about themselves either by choice or unexpectedly by others, referred to as participatory surveillance. Data about location can also be accidentally published, for example, when someone posts a picture with a store as a background. Caution should be exercised when posting information online, social networks vary in what they allow users to make private and what remains publicly accessible.[13] Without strong security settings in place and careful attention to what remains public, a person can be profiled by searching for and collecting disparate pieces of information, worst case leading to cases of cyberstalking[14] or reputation damage.[15]

Cookies are used in websites that users may allow the website to retrieve some information from user's internet which it usually does not mention what the data being retrieved is.[16] It is a common method used to monitor and track users' internet activity.[16] In 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) passed regulation that forces websites to visibly disclose to consumers their information privacy practices, referred to as cookie notices.[17] This was issued to give consumers the choice of what information about their behavior they consent to letting websites track, however its effectiveness is controversial.[17] Some websites may engage in deceptive practices such as placing the cookie notices in places on the page that are not visible, or only giving consumers notice that their information is being tracked, but not allowing them to change their privacy settings.[17]Apps like Instagram and Facebook collect user data for a personalised app experience, however they track user activity on other apps which jeopardises user's privacy and data.

As location tracking capabilities of mobile devices are advancing (location-based services), problems related to user privacy arise. Location data is among the most sensitive data currently being collected.[18] A list of potentially sensitive professional and personal information that could be inferred about an individual knowing only their mobility trace was published in 2009 by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[19] These include the movements of a competitor sales force, attendance of a particular church or an individual's presence in a motel, or at an abortion clinic. A recent MIT study[20][21] by de Montjoye et al. showed that four spatio-temporal points, approximate places and times, are enough to uniquely identify 95% of 1.5 million people in a mobility database. The study further shows that these constraints hold even when the resolution of the dataset is low. Therefore, even coarse or blurred datasets provide little anonymity.

People may not wish for their medical records to be revealed to others due to the confidentiality and sensitivity of what the information could reveal about their health. For example, they might be concerned that it might affect their insurance coverage or employment. Or, it may be because they would not wish for others to know about any medical or psychological conditions or treatments that would bring embarrassment upon themselves. Revealing medical data could also reveal other details about one's personal life.[22] There are three major categories of medical privacy: informational (the degree of control over personal information), physical (the degree of physical inaccessibility to others), and psychological (the extent to which the doctor respects patients’ cultural beliefs, inner thoughts, values, feelings, and religious practices and allows them to make personal decisions).[23] Physicians and psychiatrists in many cultures and countries have standards for doctor–patient relationships, which include maintaining confidentiality. In some cases, the physician–patient privilege is legally protected. These practices are in place to protect the dignity of patients, and to ensure that patients feel free to reveal complete and accurate information required for them to receive the correct treatment.[24] To view the United States' laws on governing privacy of private health information, see HIPAA and the HITECH Act. The Australian law is the Privacy Act 1988 Australia as well as state-based health records legislation.

Political privacy has been a concern since voting systems emerged in ancient times. The secret ballot is the simplest and most widespread measure to ensure that political views are not known to anyone other than the voters themselves—it is nearly universal in modern democracy and considered to be a basic right of citizenship. In fact, even where other rights of privacy do not exist, this type of privacy very often does. Unfortunately, there are several forms of voting fraud or privacy violations possible with the use of digital voting machines.[25]