None of Your E-Business
Protecting Your Privacy in Cyberspace
By Aviel D. Rubin
The advent of the Internet and its wide-scale adoption have irrevocably changed the way we interact with each other, the way we transact business, and the way personal information is gathered and maintained about us. While progress is always exciting and provides a multitude of opportunities, there's also a dark side. Never before has there been such an opportunity for aggregating and cross-referencing personal information about people.
Before the Internet, when you physically browsed a bookstore, the store might keep track of which books you bought and which you returned. Now, you're more likely to shop online at amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com. These stores can keep track of which books you bought, which books you browsed, from which books you read a sample chapter, which books you recommended, and which books you avoided. They even know what search terms you use to locate books. Similarly, the online grocery can elicit much more information from its customers than the physical supermarket of the past, and so can the pharmacy and the online video store. In short, when you interact online, a record is created of every single action you take. But this is only half of the picture. More and more organizations are going online. So the sanctity of the sensitive records they keep is subject to the quality of their computer security. It doesn't do any good for an organization to maintain a respectable privacy policy if its machines are wide open to attack. Unfortunately, security on the Web is dismal at best.
