Navigating Personal Data Privacy in the Digital Age
Explore data privacy's evolution from the internet's early days to today's challenges, and the future of protecting digital identities.
PAST | 1990s–2000s
Building a Digital Surveillance Architecture
“As the Internet matures, preserving user privacy and anonymity is becoming a significant problem. Technology now makes it possible for online businesses and advertisers to turn the Internet into a realm where activities and habits are monitored and recorded, largely without consumer knowledge or consent. Unless businesses can protect privacy, the erosion of trust could seriously harm e-commerce as well as cause the public to become wary about using the Internet for education, research and other important non-commercial functions.”
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Privacy on the Internet, New York Times (2000)
Internet users first became concerned about privacy online when browsers began employing http cookies. Cookies were developed in 1994 by a programmer at Netscape, one of the early browsers on the World Wide Web.
Cookies changed the browsing experience by creating a log of a user’s activity, paving the way for the personalized browsing experience we know today, and creating valuable information for advertisers– and, critically, not asking user’s permission to do so.
Image by Paolo Attivissimo Designs on Flickr
The development of social media platforms in the late 90s, and their popularization in the early 2000s, created a culture of digital sharing, and a repository of personal data.
In the wake of the attacks on September 11th, the USA Patriot Act of 2001 gave the US government the authority to monitor individuals' phone and email communications via internet and telecommunications providers, showing the interest such data holds for governmental bodies.
The release of the first iPhone in 2007, and the subsequent adoption of smartphones, increased the amount of personal data created– now the internet could be browsed from almost anywhere.
Then, the release of both the Amazon Echo and Apple Watch in 2014 signaled a new wave of internet-enabled devices, extending the reach of data collection and analytics into further aspects of daily life such as home appliances and exercise.
PRESENT | Today, 2024
Privacy Pessimism
In 2015, Shoshanna Zuboff wrote in “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization”, that we had entered an age of “surveillance capitalism”– a system driven by data accumulation that “aims to predict and modify human behavior as a means to produce revenue and market control”. We see this impulse across digital life, from targeted ads that leverage our search history and demographic data to influence our shopping habits, to the Youtube algorithms that push extremist content to keep us clicking play on the next video.
The 2010s saw a series of data privacy issues making the news, from Edward Snowden’s leaking of NSA surveillance using Google and Facebook data in 2013, to Equifax’s breaching of the sensitive information of millions of customers in 2017, to Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of Facebook data to influence voters in 2018. Americans became aware of their digital footprints– the cloud of data generated by internet use– and its vulnerability to surveillance by both governmental and corporate actors.
Social media incentivizes us to share— pictures, videos, thoughts— for the dopamine gained by receiving likes and generating conversation. However, individuals are largely uncomfortable with the reality that their data is collected in the process of digital sharing. Pew Research Center’s 2023 report on data privacy finds Americans feeling “concerned and confused” about the data companies and the government are collecting, and powerless to protect their data from surveillance.
Each app, platform and device has its own data use policy, written in an inaccessible, academic register, making it extremely difficult for one individual to manage their own digital privacy, and enabling tech companies to collect data unimpeded.
Image by John Curtis Designs on Flickr
Groups like the Electronic Freedom Foundation are working to interrupt this cycle of disempowerment by raising awareness of the actions individuals can take to protect their data. More and more privacy enhancing tools have become available as interest in individual data grows.
Encrypted messaging apps are gaining popularity– so much so that disinformation on encrypted messaging apps has become an issue. Encrypted password management software and cookie-blocking privacy browsers are also popular software choices. For a comprehensive guide to building your own digital privacy practice, visit the Electronic Freedom Foundation’s online guide to surveillance self-defense.
Four strategies to help protect your data online:
FUTURE | 2025 and Beyond
New Understandings of Privacy
“We must think of privacy not as an individual right or responsibility but as a structural problem, created by political and institutional forces and addressable only by interventions at those levels.” -Alice Marwick, The Private is Political, Networked Privacy and Social Media
Privacy scholar Alice Marwick argues that rather than thinking of digital privacy as an individual responsibility, we should think of privacy as a systemic issue, shaped by corporate and governmental policy. With this perspective in mind, new technologies involving data collection should be critically evaluated as to what potential harm the creation of the data enables.
For example, many city transit systems are transitioning from closed loop fare collection (using fare cards managed by the transit authority) to an open loop system (utilizing third party payment systems like NFC enabled bank cards and digital wallets).
This saves time and increases convenience for passengers who already use digital wallets, but it also links travel data with personal data, and makes this sensitive information the responsibility of the company running the backend. These systems need to include safeguards to prevent this data from being accessed by government, law enforcement, or corporations.
Image by Nicolas Nova Designs on Flickr
Additionally, privacy education is a key component of digital literacy. Raising awareness of the stakes of digital surveillance and the available tools for data protection can empower internet users to think critically, educate others and advocate for a more free web.
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As someone born in the late 90s, I feel as though I grew up alongside the internet. The education I received about the internet touched on privacy, but only in relation to not giving information out online because of ‘stranger danger’. While I’ve been vaguely aware of digital privacy risks for some time, it’s only through my introductory coursework in Library and Information Science that I’ve stopped to try to understand the issue.
Image by Ristretto.black
In “Privacy on the Internet”, the essay from almost 25 years ago referenced earlier, the writer predicts that unless “businesses can protect privacy, the erosion of trust could seriously harm e-commerce as well as cause the public to become wary about using the Internet for education, research and other important non-commercial functions”.
In the years that have passed, we’ve grown to rely on the internet for more and more of these non-commercial functions, and all the while, since our privacy has not been protected, our trust in the internet has been eroding. Is it possible to build an internet that we can trust? Protecting user privacy is an essential step.