Digital privacy is often used in contexts that promote advocacy on behalf of individual and consumer privacy rights in e-services and is typically used in opposition to the business practices of many e-marketers, businesses, and companies to collect and use such information and data.[1][2] Digital privacy can be defined under three sub-related categories: information privacy, communication privacy, and individual privacy.[3]
Digital privacy has increasingly become a topic of interest as information and data shared over the social web have continued to become more and more commodified; social-media users are now considered unpaid 'digital labors', as one pays for 'free' e-services through the loss of their privacy.[4] For example, between 2005 and 2011, the change in levels of disclosure for different profile items on Facebook show that, over the years, people want to keep more information private.[5] However, observing the seven-year span, Facebook gained a profit of $100 billion through the collection and sharing of their users' data to third-party advertisers.[4]
The more a user shares over social networks, the more privacy is lost. All the information and data on shares is connected to clusters of similar information. As the user continues to share their productive expression, it gets matched with the respective cluster and their speech and expression are no longer only in the possession of them or of their social circle. This can be seen as a consequence of bridging social capital. As people create new and diverse ties on social networks, data becomes linked. This decrease of privacy continues until bundling appears (when the ties become strong and the network more homogenous).[6]
Some laws allow filing a case against breach of digital privacy. In 2007, for instance, a class-action lawsuit was lodged on behalf of all Facebook users that led Facebook to close its advertising system "Beacon." In a similar case in 2010, the users sued Facebook once again for sharing personal user information to advertisers through their gaming application.[7] Laws are based on consumers' consent and assume that the consumers are already empowered to know their own best interest. Therefore, for the past few years, people have been focusing on self-management of digital privacy through rational and educated decision-making.
Information privacy[edit]
In the context of digital privacy, information privacy is the idea that individuals should have the freedom to determine how their digital information is collected and used. This is particularly relevant for personally identifiable information.
The concept of information privacy has evolved in parallel to the evolution of the field of Information Technology (IT). The rise of networking and computing led to the dramatic change in the ways of information exchange. The baseline for this concept was put forward in the late 1940s, and the third era of privacy development began in the 1990s.[9]
The European Union has various privacy laws that dictate how information may be collected and used by companies. Some of those laws are written to give agency to the preferences of individuals/consumers in how their data is used. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an example of this. In other places, like in the United States, privacy law is argued by some to be less developed in this regard.[10] By example, some legislation, or lack thereof, allow companies to self-regulate their collection and dissemination practices of consumer information.
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