Role of the State in Internet Privacy Protection Essay

Role of the State in Internet Privacy Protection - Essay Example To specify, information privacy is believed to exist if one is able to monitor the usage of personal information, its circulation, and release (Culnan 341). With the rapid growth of the web space and technology advancement, concerns of users’ about personal privacy threats are also growing. Research into the issue found that internet users today are exposed to embarrassment, stalking, cyber-bullying, blackmailing, and identity hacking due to users’ displaying lots of personal data. This has led many people believe that internet privacy does not exist at all and is impossible to control. Others believe that the issue of internet privacy is not that important and should be regulated by the market. In my view, internet privacy exists once it is protected by the law. Many people believe that maintaining privacy on the internet and particularly while visiting social networking web sites is their basic human right. So they suppose that the basic thing they need to do to prote ct their privacy is to simply adjust the privacy settings, Steven Rambam and other interested authors think that privacy does not at all exist on the internet. Rambam, a private investigator and director of Pallorium Investigative Agency, expressed these ideas in a series of talks at U.S. conferences. His basic idea is â€Å"Privacy is Dead – Get Over It†. ... in a few hours about an individual unfamiliar to him (Rambam, â€Å"Privacy is Dead – Get Over It†) At the Last HOPE Conference, Rambam discussed the process of searching for necessary information on the internet via intrusion into privacy, which as the investigator notes â€Å"is out of the bottle† (Mills, â€Å"The Internet – a Private Eye’s Best Friend†). Rambam argues that each new search through Google, every blog post, and each new photo posted online mean further losing the battle led for privacy protection. This can be explained by the fact that â€Å"anything you put on the internet will be grabbed, indexed, cataloged, and out of your control before you know it† (Mills, â€Å"The Internet – a Private Eye’s Best Friend†). Rambam specifies that every kind of information online is digitized, with older information scanned and placed online. Afterwards, this mixture gets aggregated into special databases which are later sold to government agencies, marketers, and practically anyone capable of purchasing it. Twitter, cell phones, taking photos by iPods, etc are effective tools for identifying individual’s location, preferences in buying and similar information is collected by special marketing databases that are usually bought by the government. Due to the use of the information supplied by consumer databases, individuals are tracked down by the police, different collection agencies, and the U.S. Marshall’s Service (Mills, â€Å"The Internet – a Private Eye’s Best Friend†). The question arises then: what to do about this? It seems Rambam’s advice is to just â€Å"get over† the reality that privacy is dead on the internet. Next, many researchers acknowledge that privacy is under threat on the internet and suggest how to protect it. Specifically, the