technoculture314-09

The emergence of computers and the Internet is breaking the natural barrier of citizens’ privacy. People are likely existed in a "vitreous society", invasion of others’ privacy is becoming an easy thing than ever. Meanwhile, the online privacy violations are also becoming increasingly complex. Internet users, Web sites, online survey companies, content providers and equipment suppliers are all likely to become the potential object of infringement.

According to the news report, the FTC takes on targeted web advertisements. Jon Leibowitz (chairman of FTC) wants to terminate or at least rein in “behavioral targeting”, which practice he finds is not less harmful than spyware that gathers information on web users’ surfing habits. Mainly, this decision is driving at protecting consumer privacy and providing a much safer online consuming environment. Most web sites use cookies as tracking software including free site services from Google’s G-mail to Social Network Site Facebook. Web sites can use this software to record what users are interested in during their every mouse click. It generates and records into a database so that most Web sites have produced a series of user's personal files according to each IP address without authorization, due to those files advertiser can basically grasp user's personality and online shopping habits, and thus purposefully sends an advertisement on sensitive information in a more targeted way to achieve their commercial purposes. And because it is all happening within the virtual digital world, there is still a large among of users could not aware the potential risk of leaking personal information. Picture this: one day you are walking into a shopping mall may be on queen st, a salesman while help you choosing your new clothes also could name your historical consumptions of when and what had you shopped in the same store. And he also could list your personal information like your home address, work place, bank account, password, or even your age, height, weight, whether you are married or not. Based on those information, he selects and probably makes an ideal shopping suggestion for you, would you still be so comfortable to accept all these from an entire stranger who you have never met before? Therefore, the difficult is to properly protect users’ privacy and simultaneously without hindering normal development of the network.

In addition, there is still not an objective system in protecting Internet privacy. “Online privacy” legalization is a key issue that needs to be pushed to speed up the protection of information security, regulate the operation of the Internet. The strict rule of law will regulate information security and market operation mechanism, and it provides a basis to crack down privacy violations. And more important, protection of individual privacy and protection of individual rights is every citizen’s responsibility, and only with such a coordinated development of the Internet, we will then have a free and personalized space.