The Nature of Online Privacy

In the early days of the Internet, it quickly became obvious that the connectivity it provided enabled wholly new forms of mass marketing through e-mails, targeted ads, and SMS text messages, to name a few.

Over the past few years, a nuanced understanding of customer data privacy over the Internet and in the cloud has evolved as people realized their personal information was sold and traded. Some of the basic tenets of this still-developing view of customer data privacy include the following:

Individuals should own their own data, not the company or organization that collects it.

Individuals have—in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis—the “right to be left alone.”

Individuals should consent to the collection of personal data and how it will be used, with the option to opt out, for example, by rejecting cookies or profiles.

Individuals should have access to and control over their personal data, meaning that individuals have the right to see where their data is, to prevent its use for certain types of applications such as marketing, and to correct and delete it (the “right to be forgotten”).