13 - Privacy and data protection in cyberspace

Summary

‘Privacy’ has numerous meanings, and its importance varies greatly among individuals, communities, organisations and governments. It is an aspect of freedom and human rights. Civil libertarians may believe that our actions and behaviour should not be subject to public or governmental scrutiny; protectionists may accept such erosions for the greater good in the name of law and order. The development of technology, together with social, economic and political factors, has raised the antennas of those concerned with interference from governments, enterprises and others on personal freedoms.

Historically, governments seem to have pursued increasing and systemic invasions of privacy in the name of law and order, fighting crime and terrorism. However, their role is in fact to ensure and balance security issues and the proper protection of the privacy rights of the individual. In the 1990s the Clipper Chip was proposed by the US government, ostensibly for the purpose of allowing the government to override individual encryption to protect society from ‘gangsters, terrorists and drug users’. Such a process would have allowed the government to access and decipher all encrypted files. The proposal was unsuccessful. In Australia in 1984, an attempt to pass a Privacy Act failed because it set in place an anti-privacy provision: a central national identification card.

Search engines such as Google use sophisticated programs called spiders, robots and wanderers to trawl the internet gathering data on several billion websites, creating an index that handles several million enquiries per day.