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2.2 Internet
The Internet, originally conceived in the 1960s and developed in the 1980s as a scientific
network for exchanging information, was not designed for the purpose of separating
information flows (Michener 1999). The World Wide Web of today was not foreseen, and
neither was the possibility of misuse of the Internet. Social network sites emerged for use
within a community of people who knew each other in real life—at first, mostly in academic
settings—rather than being developed for a worldwide community of users (Ellison 2007). It
was assumed that sharing with close friends would not cause any harm, and privacy and
security only appeared on the agenda when the network grew larger. This means that privacy
concerns often had to be dealt with as add-ons rather than by-design.
A major theme in the discussion of Internet privacy revolves around the use of cookies
(Palmer 2005). Cookies are small pieces of data that web sites store on the user's computer,
in order to enable personalization of the site. However, some cookies can be used to track the
user across multiple web sites (tracking cookies), enabling for example advertisements for a
product the user has recently viewed on a totally different site. Again, it is not always clear
what the generated information is used for. Laws requiring user consent for the use of
cookies are not always successful, as the user may simply click away any requests for
consent, merely finding them annoying. Similarly, features of social network sites embedded
in other sites (e.g., “like”-button) may allow the social network site to identify the sites
visited by the user (Krishnamurthy & Wills 2009).
The recent development of cloud computing increases the many privacy concerns (Ruiter &
Warnier 2011). Previously, whereas information would be available from the web, user data
and programs would still be stored locally, preventing program vendors from having access
to the data and usage statistics. In cloud computing, both data and programs are online (in the
cloud), and it is not always clear what the user-generated and system-generated data are used
for. Moreover, as data is located elsewhere in the world, it is not even always obvious which
law is applicable, and which authorities can demand access to the data. Data gathered by
online services and apps such as search engines and games are of particular concern here.
Which data is used and communicated by applications (browsing history, contact lists, etc.)
is not always clear, and even when it is, the only choice available to the user may be not to
use the application. In general, IT services have more and different privacy issues than IT
products (Pieters 2013).
Some special features of Internet privacy (social media and Big Data) are discussed in the
following sections.
2.7 E-Government
Government and public administration have undergone radical transformations as a result of
the availability of advanced IT systems as well. Examples of these changes are biometric
passports, online e-government services, voting systems, a variety of online citizen
participation tools and platforms or online access to recordings of sessions of parliament and
government committee meetings.
Consider the case of voting in elections. Information technology may play a role in different
phases in the voting process, which may have different impact on voter privacy. Most
countries have a requirement that elections are to be held by secret ballot, to prevent vote
buying and coercion. In this case, the voter is supposed to keep her vote private, even if she
would want to reveal it. For information technology used for casting votes, this is defined as
the requirement of receipt-freeness or coercion-resistance (Delaune, Kremer & Ryan 2006).
In polling stations, the authorities see to it that the voter keeps the vote private, but such
surveillance is not possible when voting by mail or online, and it cannot even be enforced by
technological means, as someone can always watch while the voter votes. In this case,
privacy is not only a right but also a duty, and information technology developments play an
important role in the possibilities of the voter to fulfill this duty, as well as the possibilities of
the authorities to verify this. In a broader sense, e-democracy initiatives may change the way
privacy is viewed in the political process.
3.3 Cryptography
Cryptography has long been used as a means to protect data, dating back to the Caesar cipher
more than two thousand years ago. Modern cryptographic techniques are essential in any IT
system that needs to store (and thus protect) personal data. Note however that by itself
cryptography does not provide any protection against data breaching; only when applied
correctly in a specific context does it become a ‘fence’ around personal data. Cryptography is
a large field, so any description here will be incomplete. We'll focus instead on some newer
cryptographic techniques, in particular homomorphic encryption, that have the potential to
become very important for processing and searching in personal data.
Various techniques exist for searching through encrypted data (Song et al. 2000), which
provides a form of privacy protection (the data is encrypted) and selective access to sensitive
data. One relatively new technique that can be used for designing privacy-preserving systems
is ‘homomorphic encryption’ (Gentry 2009). Homomorphic encryption allows a data
processor to process encrypted data, i.e., users could send personal data in encrypted form
and get back some useful results—for example, recommendations of movies that online
friends like—in encrypted form. The original user can then again decrypt the result and use it
without revealing any personal data to the data processor. Homomorphic encryption, for
example, could be used to aggregate encrypted data thereby allowing both privacy protection
and useful (anonymized) aggregate information. The technique is currently still in its
infancy; it does not scale yet to the large amounts of data stored in today's systems. However,
if homomorphic encryption could be made to work more efficiently the results have the
potential to be revolutionary, at least for privacy-preserving systems.