Amid growing curiosity and concern over these flows, policy-makers, public-interest advocates, and the media have responded with exposés and critiques of pervasive surreptitious tracking, manipulative behavioral advertising, and fickle privacy commitments of major corporate actors. As adoption of the Internet and Web has surged and as they have become the primary sources of information and media for transaction, interaction, and communication, particularly among well off people in technologically advanced societies, we have witnessed radical perturbations in flows of personal information. In a flourishing online ecology, where individuals, communities, institutions, and corporations generate content, experiences, interactions, and services, the supreme currency is information, including information about people. Setting aside economic and institutional factors, challenges to privacy associated with the Net are similar to those raised in the past by other information systems and digital media due to their vast capacities for capturing, stockpiling, retrieving, analyzing, distributing, displaying, and disseminating information. This approach takes into consideration the formative ideals of the Internet as a public good. Finally, the essay lays out an alternative approach to addressing the problem of privacy online based on the theory of privacy as contextual integrity. It considers why privacy online has been vexing, even beyond general concerns over privacy why predominant approaches have persisted despite their limited results and why they should be challenged. This article explores present-day concerns about online privacy, but in order to understand and explain on-the-ground activities and the anxieties they stir, it identifies the principles, forces, and values behind them. government, via the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) 3 and the Department of Commerce, 4 released two reports in December 2010 depicting the Net as a place where every step is watched and every click recorded by data-hungry private and governmental entities, and where every response is coveted by attention-seekers and influence-peddlers. In its series “On What They Know,” The Wall Street Journal aimed a spotlight at the rampant tracking of individuals for behavioral advertising and other reasons. 1 Reports of privacy gaffes, such as those associated with Google Buzz and Facebook’s fickle privacy policies, graced front pages of prominent news media. The year 2010 was big for online privacy. In developing this approach, the paper warns that the current bias in conceiving of the Net as a predominantly commercial enterprise seriously limits the privacy agenda. Instead, we must articulate a backdrop of context-specific substantive norms that constrain what information websites can collect, with whom they can share it, and under what conditions it can be shared. Proposals to improve and fortify notice-and-consent, such as clearer privacy policies and fairer information practices, will not overcome a fundamental flaw in the model, namely, its assumption that individuals can understand all facts relevant to true choice at the moment of pair-wise contracting between individuals and data gatherers. This essay presents an alternative approach, rooted in the theory of contextual integrity. In the United States, notice-and-consent remains the fallback approach in online privacy policies, despite its weaknesses. How to protect privacy online is a frequent question in public discourse and has reignited the interest of government actors. Recent media revelations have demonstrated the extent of third-party tracking and monitoring online, much of it spurred by data aggregation, profiling, and selective targeting.
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