Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in 2010 that privacy was no longer a “social norm.” Four years later, the pendulum might be ready to swing the other way.
The second generation of digital citizens — teenagers and millennials, who have spent most, if not all, of their lives online — appear to be more likely to embrace the tools of privacy and protect their personal information.
Disappearing-message apps like Snapchat and Cyber Dust have been embraced by young people who are not eager to leave too much of a digital footprint. Video apps like Vine and Instagram let you create an edited version of your world instead of uploading all your personal details.
Even Facebook, despite years of resistance, recently changed its default for new posts from “public” to “friends” and introduced tools that let you easily untag yourself in other people’s photos and change old posts from public to friends-only.
“Previously there had been a sort of undue trust in the magic of cloud services,” said Justin Brookman, director of the Consumer Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. “People are starting to reconsider that.”
“For some people, the results will be that we don’t have any privacy and we should get over that,” he said. “But I don’t think people want that. We’ve seen the younger generation search out tools that let them communicate in more private ways.”
These tools are not foolproof, but they speak to an interest in sharing less freely and being more judicious.
Devices like the Blackphone also offer expanded tools for protecting your privacy — like encryption of data and more secure app management — that could trickle into mainstream products.
And regulatory pressure in the US and Europe might be forcing companies to think twice about what they do with personal information.
“You’re seeing more pressure on companies to be more explicit about what they’re doing with your data,” Brookman said. “But a lot of companies would just as soon fly under the radar. Requiring real transparency and real choice would help a lot in these matters.”
There might be only so much we can do to protect ourselves against hackers bent on stealing our information. You can create stronger passwords and enable things like multi-factor authentication, which adds steps to logging into an online account.
Sure, a person wearing Google Glass could be surreptitiously recording your conversations or actions in public, but many losses of online privacy are self-inflicted. That is one reason the phrase “reasonable expectation of privacy” has a tortured history on the Web.
Its origins are in a US Supreme Court ruling that helped refine the fourth amendment to its constitution, which protects citizens against unreasonable search and seizure. A 1967 ruling by the court created the concept of the expectation of privacy, but further cases determined that the expectation might not exist for information that you knowingly expose to a third party.
That cuts a pretty broad path, it turns out, since it applies to almost any information you give to someone else.
And while it used to be assumed that you had a reasonable expectation of privacy in places like your home, privacy on the Internet or anything connected to it has proved difficult to defend. It does not help if you willingly share information with other people — and companies — on social media.
Your mobile phone might also be tracking your precise location and compiling a complete record of your whereabouts. Although the court ruled this year that police can not search a phone without a warrant, the US Federal Government has argued that it does not need a warrant to obtain that history from cellular providers, because you can not reasonably expect that information to be private.
The ads you click on and your search history paint a picture of what you buy, what interests you and what ails you.
Even your e-mail and personal messages might be fair game. Google said in a court filing last year that users had no reasonable expectation that their e-mail communications are confidential.
That is a reminder for young people — and maybe even some of the older ones — that there is plenty of data pointing to a need to think twice about online behavior.
At about this time last year, the Pew Research Center reported that 86 percent of Internet users had taken some kind of steps to avoid being identified or tracked online, even though almost 60 percent of them thought that true online anonymity was impossible.
They might be right about anonymity, but others might still argue that keeping at least some privacy is worth a shot.
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