Realm of Privacy problems

Literature defines the word privacy as the “right to be let alone”. Similarly, the coined term e-Privacy can be understood as privacy in digital space. But as technologies continue to grow, the meaning of e-Privacy is getting notoriously difficult to define due to various reasons such as legal, social-psychological, economical or political. (I will use the word e-Privacy as privacy going forward)

Privacy is indeed an unusually slippery concept. Everyone talks about privacy problems in their context. But if I have to categorize the privacy problems, I would divide it into three categories — “Information Collection”, “Information Processing” and “Information Dissemination”.

Information collection is the door to privacy problems. It defines the step when a user knowingly or unknowingly consent to the Terms and Conditions of the enterprise and the enterprise collects the user’s PII or non-PII information. With the increasing awareness of privacy among users, enterprises are coming up with different solutions to lock the door itself, for example — private browser, private VPN, private mobile applications (including federated learning).

After collecting the user’s information, enterprises process this information either to provide value to users or to run their business models. Even though enterprises claim to take proper actions to keep their user’s data secure and private, how much visibility do we have as a user. Do the companies do what they say? Do the companies use the collected data only for the stated purpose? It is still a big question.

Many times companies run businesses in partnership. And they have to share their user’s data with their partner company which is called Information Disclosure or Information Dissemination. Primary companies (who are concerned about their user’s privacy) usually try to assess the risk to privacy before proceeding to transfer the data. Scrubbing the information is one common approach to avoid privacy concerns. But with the advancement of technology, linking the different sources of information to develop the user profile is not much of a deal (also known as linked PII information). Information Dissemination is the source of many privacy problems that have always been difficult to understand.

GDPR and CCPA are making an effort to define the area of privacy. But is the definition clear enough now, maybe yes or maybe not? I think sometimes it is ok to have the imprecise concept of something (privacy in this case) to maintain the fluidity in space. It will enable new thought processes and identify new dimensions to address the problems that arise due to rapid technological evolution.

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