Privacy on the Internet: a sweet dream?

Quentin Jaubert, Adrien Zamora

Introduction

“Big Brother is watching you” wrote Georges Orwell. In this groundbreaking book, Orwell describes a society in which the officials know everything that would happen inside the country by performing an omnipresent surveillance over the inhabitants. Today’s police forces and secret services own a numerous number of surveillance tools such as biometry, chips, facial recognition, localization that allow them to become very intrusive security forces. But the “policing” has now also become the property of major private companies (social media platforms, search engines, telecommunication carriers etc). A funny way of rethinking Orwell’s quote in our modern world would be: “Big Browser is watching you”.

There was a time where people had their privacy. One could go shopping when exiting the office, buy several stuffs in cash, go back home, close the doors and curtains, and run their private life. That was it. But privacy has evolved over time. If “privacy” can be defined as a “right to be let alone” (Warren and Brandeis, 1890), or even “the right to prevent the disclosure of personal information to others” (Westin, 1968), the concept has recently taken a multidimensional nature regarding “information, accessibility and expression” (Decew, 1997), and with the rise of the Internet, technology has created new privacy issues (Austin, 2003) which lead us to wonder: is online privacy a sweet dream?

In order to understand the issues linked to our online privacy and generate insights from it, we adopted the following method:

How has the privacy concept evolved with the appearance of the Internet?

In such a connected world, should we/can we protect our privacy? If yes, how?

Where will we be standing in the next 5, 10, 20 years? Will “online privacy” ever mean anything in the next decades?

Read the full strategic report here: privacy on the internet: a sweet dream?

References