Online Social Networks and E-Commerce - MIT Computer Science ...

Require Business to Draft Protection Plan
Clarence Lee and Shirley Fung
We propose that a similar plan to the Safeguard Rule to be applied to third party Web sites. This
establishes a standard requiring all Web sites having to store user information to comply. In addition, the
major benefit of an established system such as this is to help consumers understand the steps taken to
protect their data.
Establish Enforcement Authority
Lastly, the most important part of our proposal is to establish enforcement authority. While enacting
GLBA enforcement structure for our proposal would be a big step forward for protecting online customer
privacy, we feel that there is a way that the enforcement authority could be enhanced.
The biggest problem with the GLBA enforcement structure is that it places the burden of enforcement
entirely on the Federal Government. We recommend that the state government to have to power of
enforcement as well. While one may contest this notion by pointing out the fact that a particular Web site
may store user data from all 50 states, such ambiguity could be enforced by the state in which the Web
site’s creators reside in. Similar to how the United States Court Circuit alleviate burden off the Supreme
Court, this method will alleviate the Federal Government’s burden of enforcing this accountability
structure in all fifty states.
Conclusion
Unlike ten years ago, the Internet has grown to be a common household commodity. Social networking
sites and e-commerce sites has enjoyed a period of immense growth. As the popularity of these Web
sites increase, the gap between our virtual life on the Internet and our real life in the physical world
becomes smaller and smaller. As a result, we must reexamine whether the privacy policies implemented
years ago should be updated in order to keep up with the incredible progress of technology.
For this paper, we examined two types of Web sites: e-commerce Web sites and social network Web sites.
The combination of both makes up a significant portion of Web traffic. In addition, we looked at two
specific examples: Amazon and Facebook, and we examined the types of user information that is stored
on both.
Due to the massive amount of personal data stored on both of these Web sites, we proposed two solutions
to ensure consumer privacy protection. The first is to require a blanket protection policy to protect
private data from government intrusion. Given that the type of data on these Web sites can tell someone a
lot of a user, a blanket protection policy is needed to protect all data so one cannot circumvent the system
by acquiring information in a less protected category.
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