Presidential Candidates’ Privacy Invaded, And Not By The Media
Friday, March 21st, 2008National Public Radio - March 21, 2008
State Department contractors were caught accessing data on presidential hopefuls Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Luckily, software that monitors high-profile individuals caught the snooping, but, of course, average Americans don’t enjoy the same enhanced protections.
Ira Flatow used this incident to launch an NPR Science Friday Online Privacy discussion. A couple of highlights:
- Users “pay” for Internet sites with personal information, but it is not clear the value-received matches the privacy cost. Facebook provides a great example of users freely sharing information with friends and not truly understanding the cost of the privacy loss until much later (e.g., when your party photos become public and threaten your Miss America pageant hopes).
- The social contract between site operators and users is critical to maintaining any web privacy (e.g., Google’s Gmail will use personal information in your email inbox to place targeted advertising, but not re-sell that personal information to third parties).
- Online privacy could take a significant step forward if web site operators changed from a opt-out to an opt-in policy for using information collected from site users.
Whether information is financial or not, if seems clear that users need to act more proactively to shield information from misuse rather than relying on the social contract and technologies to protect data already collected.