Maintaining Sovereignty over Personal Data in Social Networking Sites

The rise of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn has provided a platform for individuals to easily stay in touch with friends, family, and colleagues and actively encourage their users to share personal information. With the wealth of activities available on SNS, the amount and variety of personal information shared is considerable and diverse. Additionally, due to its digital nature, this information can be easily copied, modified, and disclosed without the explicit consent of their owner. Moreover, as the Internet never really forgets, once the information is out on the Web, there is no real hope for an individual to exercise their right to be forgotten. As a consequence, maintaining sovereignty on personal data is more challenging than ever due to the proliferation of personal information on the Web and the increasing analytical power available to large institutions (and to everyone else with a credit card) through people search engines (Weitzner et al. 2008). Moreover, standard security and privacy techniques such as access control mechanisms or simple watermarking techniques are no longer sufficient to protect privacy in the age of SNS (Kagal and Abelson 2010). Personal information disclosed from SNS could affect users’ lives, with privacy risks ranging from simple embarrassment to ruining their reputation, or even identity theft. Recently, a health department official in Washington used the message functionality of Facebook to get in touch with a teenager about her sexually transmitted disease (STD). The girl received a message saying that she needed to call the Spokane Regional Health District for important information about her health. The actual STD diagnosis was not included in the post, but the girl’s mother says this is still a violation of her privacy (Allen 2011).