Privacy

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this unit, learners should be able to:

• differentiate between personal and private information

• explain how service providers obtain personal information 

• discuss measures to take when one's online privacy has been compromised.

How Service Providers Succeed in Obtaining Personal Information

Software systems have become essential tools in our daily lives. However, users often forget that they do not consume their information alone; instead, they deliver personal information to service providers. This collection of data causes users' privacy to become increasingly at risk. Informing users about what and how data is collected is imperative for achieving transparency, trust, and ethics in modern technology systems. The key aim of privacy is to make users aware of what happens with their personal data. But instead, they are substantial and deliberately obscure. Information about data practices is hidden in extensive and vague text passages (Brunotte et al., 2022). These extensive and vague text passages may cause users not to have any desire to read them, and may disregard essential information by not reading these texts at all. Often, users accept terms that they know nothing about later affecting their online privacy since their personal information can be accessed by third parties. 

These two YouTube videos relate to different aspects of privacy in ICTs, which also applies to Computer Application Technology: