Chapter 52 – Online Privacy

Privacy has often gained the headlines on the media in the last few years, due to the revelation of appalling invasions of what many citizens perceive as the private space of their own communications, behavior, and lifestyle. Privacy is especially in the spotlight when the online dimension is concerned with the almost endless stream of personal information that travels on the Internet. However, the apparent importance that online privacy has gained in the public discourse should not be taken as a demonstration that privacy problems are going to be solved any time soon. Furthermore, it could not be even taken as a proof of maturity in the comprehension of the problems. In fact, many privacy problems are becoming more intractable now in the modern online ecosystem than decades ago, when privacy emerged as a problem of industrialized societies. Online privacy is enmeshed with the dynamics of technology innovations, and with the shape of today's IT market, it is also entangled with the often fragile economics of the online advertising sector. At present, privacy depends to customers bounded rationality and, to put it simple, to the fact that for an individual, to manage her own online privacy specifically and timely without sacrificing to reap the benefits of the online ecosystem would be just overwhelming in the current setting. In this chapter, we discuss some particularly critical factors contributing to the problem of managing today's online privacy, followed by an introduction to some technical issues. In particular, we present in more details the case of the data broker industry, rather than the much more publicized cases of governmental surveillance and Internet-based data-centric corporations, because of its relatively lesser media exposition combined with an indisputable relevance for citizens' privacy. The problem of the informed consent and the dubbed privacy control paradox is discussed too for its centrality in almost all privacy policies and still underrated weakness. This leads us to show the complex and multidimensional nature of online privacy and the implication on policy making. In the section on privacy and technologies, we address the problem of online privacy both at the application level—by describing the current techniques used to collect a user's browsing history—and at the communication level—by discussing the methods available to defend against traffic analysis. Then, we highlight the security and privacy issues of mobile health applications.