Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1666420.1666437
Viewpoint
privacy on
the data Web
ThE WorLd WidE WEb in its current form, linking docu- ments with hyperlinks in an associative network, has led to a number of concerns
about issues related to privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. 6 But
the movement away from the linking
of documents to the linking of data, a
much more powerful paradigm allowing automation of a greater number of information processing tasks,
will test legal and technical regimes
still further.
The linked data Web, in which heterogeneous data is brought together
from distributed sources relatively
seamlessly with user-provided ontolo-gies, allows information about individuals or organizations to be queried despite being collected at different times
for different purposes, with different
provenances and different formats.
The benefits of such a Web are manifest6, 9 but threats to personal privacy
will also increase as boundaries blur
between personal information published intentionally, that published
conditionally (for example, to specific
social networking sites for a specific
audience) and information over which
the subject has no control.
One way of expressing the dilemmas that will face us is to ask the question “who owns all this data?” When it
is personal data, surely we do? Perhaps
surprisingly, the answer is no. Even if
you enter the data yourself, for example onto some Internet service, you do
not own it—the service generally does.
You will have signed up for something
in the small print—that is, you will tacitly have consented to handing over
the data. Given the highly interactive
nature of the Web where one creates
data consciously and unconsciously
all the time, this consent model will
be increasingly stretched over the next
few years.
It has always been somewhat flawed,
with few limits to the uses to which
data is put when consent to process
has been lawfully obtained (and privacy
policies may change after one has con-
sented4). Naïve users and minors often
treat policies, or terms and conditions,
as a tedious box necessary to check to
get onto a site, rather than as signing
away their rights. 8 But even when there
are no problems of asymmetric infor-
mation or proportionality, there are
social issues to be considered—privacy
is not a private matter. It impacts on a
series of wider communities.
