Like many students concerned with Internet privacy, Lisa Lee sets everything on her Facebook profile to private.
She does not allow people she does not know personally to view her profile, and while she generally feels safe about her privacy options, the second-year communication studies and political science student said it is better to be safe than sorry.
Within the last four months, the profusion of news, ranging from Facebook’s new privacy policies to the collection of Wi-Fi data by Google’s Street View cars have broken the trust of many Internet users, said Steve Peterson, a lecturer of communication studies.
Tensions over privacy rose in December after Facebook changed its policy. Every profile page had its default privacy settings set to open, which forced users to re-enter their settings.
Recent changes to the now nearly 6,000-word privacy policy have led to further concerns over the social networking site’s respect for user privacy.
However, news that Facebook would simplify its privacy policy is unlikely to change much, Peterson said. He added that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had said the social networking site was simply adapting to the public’s increasing willingness to share personal information online.
The questions that Google’s Street View project and social networking sites have dealt with are not unconnected, said Michael Curry, professor of geography and member of the UCLA Advisory Board on Privacy and Data Collection,
Since Google’s Street View project sometimes involved tracking public Wi-Fi addresses to find hard-to-reach areas, it essentially collected users’ unencrypted data, including passwords and private information, he said.
Although the information Google recorded is unlikely to be sold, people are worried about the fact that it is available and could potentially be used for identity theft.
But the issue of Internet privacy does not just concern search engines like Google.
“One thing we repeatedly see is a battle going on among users and social networking sites and privacy advocacy sites,” Curry said.
Many students are so consumed with the social aspects of social online media that they forget sites like Facebook are concerned with the business aspects, said second-year political science student Matthew Abularach.
He added that Facebook uses this lack of awareness to its advantage by selling data about user interests to other servers and websites, who then customize their advertising based on this information. Abularach said that when a user agrees to a website’s privacy policy, it is like signing a contract, and users have a responsibility to know and respect it.
He said that, while he feels that many users are concerned by the privacy policy, few are taking the measure of deleting their Facebook pages, and instead are waiting for the social networking site to simplify the privacy settings for them.
Yet the trend of providing less privacy protection online has been going on for years, said Bruce Schneier, a computer security specialist and founder of British Telecom Managed Security Solutions Group, a security company that works to protect customer information.
According to Schneier, privacy is not a salient issue for many people because they do not really think about it until it is gone. He added that conversations are becoming less transient as people rely more on instant messaging and less on face-to-face conversation. Additionally, everything online is stored permanently and cannot be deleted and more college admissions officers and employers are looking up applicants online.
“We can write “˜private’ on our front door, but it doesn’t mean people can’t come in,” he said. “Many times, the private can be very public.”
Schneier advised students to pay attention to privacy settings and understand how the Internet privacy policies can be made deliberately confusing.
“That’s how they win, because it’s hard to live without Facebook,” he said. “You either live with it or you fight.”