Often, these violations occur without the user’s knowledge; many a time the personal information submitted by a user in good faith is shared by sites or sold to advertisers with the user none the wiser.
There are howls of protest when such violations surface; but the outrage is not enough to deter violators; they continue with their prying activities.
Privacy violations occur primarily for the following five reasons:
- To enable targeting of commercial advertising;
- To obtain user preferences for sale to companies;
- To analyse user behaviour and to build site appeal;
- To threaten or intimidate victims;
- To enable government agencies to sniff personal or industrial information.
The violations are made possible by technology that enables individuals and companies to invade user systems and monitor user behavior.
This intrusion is both evident and non-evident. In the first case, the user is aware of the intrusion, resents the intrusion, and tries to fight it off. For instance, he turns on the spam guard when he finds his e-mail box bombed by spam, and blocks all unsolicited mails that are offensive or irritating.
In the second case, the user is not even aware that a third party has invaded his privacy. The two most common tools used to breach a user’s privacy are cookies and bugs. These are used by a majority of sites; the more privacy conscious sites even post messages on their sites to alert users that they use cookies and bugs.
A few sites even insist that users must provide access to cookies for better surfing experience. But there are many who use these tools to ferret information surreptitiously. Besides this, the government agencies use sniffer packets to access information.
This invasion of privacy is both discreet and brazen, depending upon the country.
It is for the users to be careful, and guard their privacy.