Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien Magisterarbeit - SemanticLab

2. Privacy Threats
Privacy is the “claim of individuals to determine for themselves, when, how and to
what extent information about them is communicated to others” (Westin 1967 cited in
[Oli04]). When it comes to privacy on the Internet, there are a lot of threats which
menace this claim and they can be categorized in different ways. According to [Sar03]
there are general threats which menace financial, medical or political privacy. Then
there are common privacy sensitive applications which are used by Internet users quite
frequently such as search engines, social network platforms, e-commerce applications or
personalized web-services. All these applications have one thing in common: they use
sensitive user-data to deliver their services. That is why common privacy threats and
privacy sensitive applications are going to be introduced in this chapter. Additionally,
some background information will also be provided on how technical issues play an
important role in privacy on the Internet.
2.1. Individual privacy attitudes
When discussing privacy threats on the Internet, the biggest threat is sometimes forgotten:
the person in front of the computer. All kinds of technical solutions can be
implemented and enforced but will not make a difference if users in front of the computer
do not reflect about their actions. This topic was already an issue when the World
Wide Web was becoming more popular. In 1998, Alan Westin published a categorization
of users and their individual attitudes to privacy as also described in [Kob07]. These
three different attitudes can also be applied to the Internet and are described as the
“privacy fundamentalists”, the “privacy pragmatists” and the “privacy unconcerned”:
• Privacy fundamentalists can be characterized by their “extreme concern about
any use of their data and an unwillingness to disclose information, even when
privacy protection mechanisms would be in place” [Kob07].
• Privacy pragmatists on the other hand are generally concerned about their
privacy, but not as much as the fundamentalists. If they can see a certain reason
for disclosing private data, they are willing to do so.
• The exact opposite of the privacy fundamentalists are privacy unconcerned
which are not as distressed by the thought of disclose their private data and how
it may be used by third parties.
Despite individual privacy attitudes there are other circumstances where privacy may
be threatened. That is why in the following two sections, general privacy issues on the
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