Privacy Rights in the Age of Technology
The issue of privacy in the midst of the information technology revolution places Libertarians in a unique position. On the one hand, Libertarians feel that an individual's right to privacy must be strictly protected and question the safety of one's personal information currently available on the Internet. On the other hand, Libertarians are not in favor of the federal government regulating the Internet. So how do Libertarians propose to protect individual's privacy on the Internet? They feel that the free market system, if left as is, and a more educated consumer will be able to advocate for privacy better than a bureaucratic organization.
Online privacy is only one of many issues regarding an individual's right to privacy in this electronic age. Other concerns include the federal government's push for Medical ID numbers and National Identification cards will lead to the rise in identity theft. Recently, there have been security issues involving the disruption of services to some of the Web's most popular and respected sites. No personal or account information was ever jeopardized during the hacker attacks, the companies reassured their customers. But anyone who has ever done an online transaction felt a bit unsettled, that if these hackers could break into the most well known sites on the Web, with supposedly the best technology, then how much protection did they have over their credit card numbers or other personal account information being exposed? There have been a handful of cases where just such information found its way into the hands of criminals, who promptly went on shopping sprees. The general rule is that if a credit card customer can prove they were unauthorized purchases, they are only held accountable for the first $50, but it is certainly a time consuming and unnerving experience. These breaches in security spurred online merchants to seek the best encryption technology possible, to protect their customer's credit card information and the company's profits.
Along with encryption technology, online merchants often have customers establish a username and password to access account information and before making purchases. There is a personal question that each user sets up, to be asked if one forgets their username/password. These are further measures taken to protect online consumer's privacy. And no one is forced to purchase things online. But another facet of the Internet involves virtually everyone that surfs the Web.
Cookies are virtual spies, recording every move a user makes on the Internet. They track not for criminal activity(ISP's have their own human spies for that purpose), but for consumer activity. Cookies keep track of which sites a particular user visits, which pages they visit on that site, and how many total pages they view on each site. They also keep track of any ads that the user may have clicked on. This information is used by companies to target a customer base more effectively, and is supposed to make the user's time spent surfing the Web more personalized. Cookies at times have been given a bad rap, and turned into some evil, "corporate Big Brother" application. The problem is the lack of basic knowledge of what cookies are, and how they can be disabled at the user's will, etc.
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