Privacy Protection: Regulations and Technologies, Opportunities and Threats

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) touch many aspects of our lives. The integration of ICTs is enhanced by the advent of mobile, wireless, and ubiquitous technologies. ICTs are increasingly embedded in common services, such as mobile and wireless communication, Internet browsing, credit card e-transactions, and electronic health records. As ICT-based services become ubiquitous, our everyday actions leave behind increasingly detailed digital

traces

in the information systems of ICT-based service providers. For example, consumers of mobile-phone technologies leave behind traces of geographic position to cellular provider records, Internet users leave behind traces of the Web pages and packet requests of their computers in the access logs of domain and network administrators, and credit card transactions reveal the locations and times where purchases were completed. Traces are an artifact of the design of services, such that their collection and storage are difficult to avoid. To dispatch calls, for instance, the current design of wireless networks requires knowledge of each mobile user’s geographic position. Analogously, DNS servers for the Internet need to know IP addresses to dispatch requests from source to destination computers.