Privacy and the Challenge of Technology

We live in an information society. Information and information technology are increasingly essential to our social, economic, and political interactions. Given this, serious reflection on information ethics is imperative. Information ethics studies the value questions that arise from the creation, control, and access to information. The Information Ethics Roundtable is a yearly conference that brings together information scientists, librarians, philosophers, and social scientists to discuss ethical issues such as intellectual property, intellectual freedom, and censorship. The focus of this year’s roundtable is privacy and technology. In one sense technology has been a boon for privacy. For instance, ATMs and online banking mean that we seldom have to present ourselves to a teller. Online shopping offers similar benefits. However, technology can also pose a serious threat to privacy, since so much of what we now do leaves an enduring digital record. This new information can be recombined to create detailed profiles that couldn’t have emerged in pre-digital days. Moreover, we often have no idea what happens to this information after it has been created.

Remember how we discussed how Google tracks you to provide you with a "better" and "more personalized" search results? If you use Firefox or Google's own Chrome browser, here's a plug-in that obfuscates the aggregate of your search queries.