The Right To Privacy: We Give It Away By Accessing Offline And Online Services

The revelation of a massive surveillance program by the US government last year raised a lot of anger and condemnation from millions of people around the world against the U.S. Mr Edward Snowden who let this cat out of the bag claims that this surveillance programme was massive. It involved the collection of phone calls, emails, and other internet activities of millions of people around the world. People were angry over this spying programme because they felt that their right to privacy was breached by the US.

Why should people be angry and upset over the revelation of a massive US spying programme? Do we have any right to privacy? Most of us will answer yes to these questions. We will claim that we have the right to policy and will want everything we do in private to remain private providing it does not break any applicable law. This can include things such as conversations we have in private with partners, friends, colleagues or employers. We also want our personal information including our names, address, and telephone numbers to remain private. It is only when we want any of these private information to be made public that they should be made public.

Unfortunately, we deceive ourselves by this perception that we have the right to privacy. We do not have this so called right to privacy. We tend to waive out our right to privacy both knowingly and unknowingly. We knowingly give up our right to personal details when we engage in activities such as opening of a bank account or applying for a passport or driving licence. We trust the agents with whom we share this information because we think that they will keep the data private and confidential. Even though we cannot wholeheartedly trust what these agents can do with the sensitive data, we still tend to leave the data with them because we need their services.

We also tend to give up our right to privacy unkonwingly when we will use and/or sign up for online services. Most online service providers have privacy policy regarding the use of their services. Users must agree to these policies before they can have access to these services. I will use the privacy policy contents of Yahoo and Google to illustrate this point.

Yahoo privacy policy states “Yahoo collects personal information when you register with Yahoo, when you use Yahoo products or services, when you visit Yahoo pages or the pages of certain Yahoo partners, and when you enter promotions or sweepstakes. Yahoo may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies.” “Yahoo automatically receives and records information from your computer and browser, including your IP address, Yahoo cookie information, software and hardware attributes, and the page you request.” What does Yahoo do with this massive data?

Yahoo claims it uses the information it gathers from you "to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfil your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.”

How can you tell when Yahoo fails to honour this statement and comprises your privacy? Consider this statement from Yahoo. “Yahoo may update this policy. We will notify you about significant changes in the way we treat personal information by sending a notice to the primary email address specified in your Yahoo account or by placing a prominent notice on our site” This means that you will not be notified about insignificant updates. Who determines what is significant and what is not significant updates? Who is that significant to, you or Yahoo? The difficulty in attempting to answer these questions clearly shows how your privacy can be comprised at will by Yahoo.

The privacy policy of Google is similar if not more sinister to that of Yahoo. It states “We may collect and store information (including personal information) locally on your device using mechanisms such as browser web storage (including HTML 5) and application data caches. We use various technologies to collect and store information when you visit a Google service, and this may include sending one or more cookies or anonymous identifiers to your device. We also use cookies and anonymous identifiers when you interact with services we offer to our partners, such as advertising services or Google features that may appear on other sites.” This demonstrates that you give away your right to privacy when you access Google’s services.

Agreeing to Google’s privacy policy also implies that you are implicitly granting the web giant the right of access to files on your local computer. With this permission, monitoring devices in the form of cookies will be secretly installed on the local computer. Google claims these devices will only collect information about your web usage. Critics however fear the devices will do more than that. They can collect both your web usage information and any sensitive information including bank details and business transactions that you stored locally on the computer.

The only way you can prevent unauthorized access to files stored locally on your computer at home is not to connect the computer to the internet. Unfortunately this is easier said than done. Only a very few of us in this modern age can use a computer or laptop without connecting it to the internet at one point or another.

We cherish our right to privacy and like to preserve it. Unfortunately we do not have the right to privacy. Any attempt for us to assert such privacy right will inevitably deny us the opportunity to enjoy our everyday activities.