Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
communicate with many friends and acquaintances at once, but this information can be
put to other purposes as well [23]. Social Intelligence Corporation provides employers
with background checks on potential employees by searching the Internet for posts and
photos by the job candidates that reveal negative activities specified by the employer,
such as “racist remarks or activities, sexually explicit photos or videos, and illegal activity
such as drug use” [24].
Recall the perspective that privacy is a “zone of inaccessability.” Using this defini-
tion, we can say that our personal information is private to the extent that we can control
who has access to it. In some settings we expect to have much more control over our per-
sonal information than in other venues. For example, we have much more control over
who takes our picture when we're at home than when we're at a football game. Hence our
expectations about the privacy of our personal information depend on the situation. In
this rest of this section, we survey a variety of ways in which private organizations col-
lect and use personal information, starting with situations in which most of us would
assume to have less privacy and finishing with situations in which we would expect to
have much more privacy.
In the Facebook social network, a
tag
is a label identifying a person in a photo. When
you post a photo to Facebook, you can tag the people in the photo who are on your list
of Facebook friends. In a similar way, any of your Facebook friends can tag you in photos
they post to the site. People tag photos in Facebook an average of 100 million times per
day [25].
In December 2010, Facebook introduced a new time-saving feature called Tag Sug-
gestions. When a Facebook user adds a new photo, Facebook uses facial recognition
software to suggest the name of the friend appearing in the photo. In June 2011, the Elec-
tronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint about Facebook Tag Sugges-
tions with the Federal Trade Commission [26]. EPIC claimed that in order to develop its
facial recognition technology, Facebook gathered facial data from users' photos without
their consent. Others raised the concern that the introduction of an automatic tagging
feature would increase the chance that photos would be improperly tagged, which could
cause a problem if the photos were not complimentary [27].
All cell phone providers in the United States are required by law to be able to track
the locations of active cell phone users to within 100 meters. The safety benefit of this
capability is obvious. Emergency response teams can reach people in distress who have
dialed 911, even if they are unable to speak or do not know exactly where they are.
The ability to identify the location of active cell phone users has other benefits. For
example, it makes it easier for cell phone companies to identify where signal strength is
weak and coverage needs to be improved.
The downside of enhanced 911 service is a potential loss of privacy. Because it is
possible to track the location of active cell phone users, what happens if information is
