ISSUES
: The Internet of Things
Chapter 1: Digital issues
15
The Internet hasn’t killed privacy – but it
has changed it forever
An article from
The Conversation
.
By Jose Such, Lecturer in Cyber Security, Lancaster University
Disclosure statement: Jose Such receives funding from EPSRC as part of the RePriCo project.
W
hen people say “privacy is dead”, it’s usually
for one of two reasons. Either they truly believe
that privacy is irrelevant or unachievable in
today’s hyper-connected world or, more often, that not
enough is being done to protect privacy when huge
amounts of personal information are being posted
online. Although I agree more could be done to protect
privacy online, I believe that privacy is not dead, it’s just
changing forms.
While it’s true that we’re sharing more information online
than ever before, this doesn’t mean that we no longer
care about privacy. On the contrary, some curious
trends in how users share information on social media
suggest we’re actually becoming more cautious.
Back in the early 2000s when the first social networks
MySpace and Facebook appeared online, users were
much more open with their personal information. Most
had ‘public’ profiles, which could be accessed by
anyone, and few cared much about privacy.
But a host of high-profile incidents have flashed through
the mainstream media in the last decade. People have
been fired from their jobs, had their secrets revealed,
divorced and cyberbullied because of content on
Facebook. So it’s no wonder that users began to
understand the perils of poor management of their
online privacy, and that Facebook users in particular
have become more protective of their personal
information. Recent research proved that people are
increasingly limiting the data that is publicly shared with
other Facebook users.
Generation gap
Despite these trends, parents of today’s teens are
particularly worried about how their children manage
their presence online. The 2013 PEW report on teens,
social media and privacy, found that only 9% of teens
were concerned about third-party access to their data
on Facebook, while 80% of parents expressed high
levels of concern about it.
Young people are certainly sharing more information
about themselves through social media than before,
and they sometimes get caught out. Recently, a 14-year-
old boy who sent a naked photo of himself to a girl on
Snapchat found that the incident had been recorded by
police.
But perhaps parents could have a little more faith – the
same report indicates that teens are being vigilant about
their online privacy in different ways. The researchers
found that: 74% of teens had unfriended and 58% had
blocked other users to avoid sharing information with
them; 60% of teens kept their profile private; 58% said
they shared inside jokes or cloaked their messages in
some way; 57% decided not to post something online
because it may have had negative consequences for
them in the future; and 26% reported false information to
help protect their privacy.
Multi-party menace
But there are some privacy issues that can’t be
addressed by adjusting user settings or sharing in-
jokes. Privacy is no longer only about what you say
or disclose about yourself online. It’s also about what
others say or disclose about you. Privacy is becoming a
collective phenomenon.
At the moment, mainstream social media only gives
control over privacy settings to those who upload
photos – not those who are in them. Take a simple but
illustrative example: if Alice uploads a photo of her and
Bob, Alice is the one who controls who gets to see the
photo. But if Bob doesn’t want Alice’s friends to see
him, it’s up to him to get Alice to take the photo down,
or else report it to the site administrator.
At the University of Lancaster, we have been looking at
how multi-party privacy conflicts emerge, and how we
might be able to solve them. We’re conducting large-
scale studies of a 1,000 social media users to help
us develop the next generation of privacy tools and
empower users who find themselves in these scenarios.
Privacy will keep changing forms in the future –
particularly as new technologies are created, existing
ones mature and users’ perceptions of privacy evolve.
The biggest challenge will be to make sure that users
have the tools they need to keep up with these changes,
and protect their privacy as they see fit.
17 September 2015
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The above information is reprinted with kind
permission from
The Conversation
. Please visit
for further information.
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The Conversation Trust (UK)
