Online Privacy in Dating, Heritage, and Shopping Sites

Introduction: Trust in the Digital Marketplace

Growing numbers of people are turning to the internet for a range of ordinary activities, and increasingly they are discovering that in doing so they are entering a world of commerce — and, to some extent, deception — built on a rather fragile foundation of trust and market forces. We have known for some time that as users of the virtual world, we are sharing information about ourselves and our wants with others. But the extent to which this information is being used in other ways has been left in the hands of a relatively unguarded concept of openness and honesty.

We seem to like the idea of putting ourselves out into the world to see what happens, whether we are looking for love, researching our family's past, or hunting for good shopping deals. Only now are we beginning to see that this sense of trust and openness may not be as solid as we once thought. In fact, what we have long regarded as privacy may be giving way to a broader reckoning with what it means to participate in a world where dollars are only one of many agents of interest.

Online Life: Dating, Heritage, and Shopping

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently examined eight popular online dating sites to assess how well they were safeguarding user privacy through standard encryption practices. The researchers found that the majority of the sites did not take even basic security precautions, leaving users vulnerable to having their personal information exposed or their entire accounts taken over when using shared networks (Hoffmann, 2012). This finding draws attention to what millions of people are effectively doing to themselves when they sign up on romance-pairing sites: they voluntarily share private information because they believe it will help them find an emotional match. Users provide these systems with significant and personal details about their likes, dislikes, and how they want that information made available to others — largely because they assume no one cares about it except, perhaps, a potential partner (McRae and McKnight, n.d.). That assumption, it turns out, falls far short of reality.

Similarly, questions are being raised about what it means to go online to discover one's own heritage. Even seemingly innocent searches for family connections can uncover intimate truths about others — truths that may be technically public but that the individuals involved have no idea exist. Ancestry.com and similar heritage sites are places where people go to learn about their family connections and history (Ancestry.com, 2012). But what does it really mean when that search results in the discovery of very intimate details about the lives of others whose existence happens to be entwined with our relatives — people we may never have met and whose privacy is of no particular concern to us (VanderpoolGormley, 1999)?

What each of these activities — online dating, heritage research, and e-commerce — share is that users are increasingly willing to give the digital world relatively reckless access to information about themselves, trusting that the marketplace of commerce will protect them from the consequences of their own disclosures (Nehf, 2005). And yet this assumption has been shown to be dangerous for consumers (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2011). When people shop in a brick-and-mortar store, they almost instinctively know they must be smart about privacy: they do not give store owners their PIN numbers or leave their wallets unattended. They know they must be careful. Yet when it comes to online shopping, dating, or genealogical research, people freely share information that can reveal a great deal about themselves and others — and there is growing evidence that profiteers and governments alike are very interested in exploiting this self-imposed vulnerability (Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 2011).

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Information Sharing

The appeal of these online sites rests primarily on the fact that the world of information and opportunity is literally at our fingertips. The systems we use are becoming friendlier and, for the most part, simpler to navigate. In many cases, access costs little and requires far less time than a trip to the library, a shopping mall, or a bar or coffeehouse. The internet is, after all, a giant representation of the market economy, and one of its great attractions is providing access to commercial opportunity on a very large scale (Nehf, 2005).

But this search for convenience carries tremendous disadvantages that we often overlook. Most obviously, it involves giving away information whose value we have little appreciation for. Equally important, we do this without recognizing that those who gather this information intend to use it to reshape our future behavior. They use it to determine where we might want to go in future searches. The privacy policies of sites like Ancestry.com, for example, openly state — if one takes the time to read them — that their software uses the information users provide to anticipate what those users might want next, effectively eliminating the element of chance or self-direction in the searches users believe they are making for themselves (Ancestry.com, 2012).

Conclusion: Rethinking Privacy in an Open Digital World

In the future we are very likely to hear more stories about how the collective promise of privacy and information sharing has fallen short of our market expectations. We will see how some businesses or even political organizations have taken to undercutting this sense of trust in ways that may not be good for what consumers expect. Some of those activities may exploit personal vulnerabilities; others may serve terror or political gain. In many ways, however, the specific motivation may not matter. Each instance will chip away at our willingness to rely on a very open and trusting system.