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Privacy has often gained the headlines on the media in the last few years, due to the revelation of appalling invasions of what many citizens perceive as the private space of their own communications, behavior, and lifestyle. Privacy is especially in the spotlight when the online dimension is concerned with the almost endless stream of personal information that travels on the Internet. However, the apparent importance that online privacy has gained in the public discourse should not be taken as a demonstration that privacy problems are going to be solved any time soon. Furthermore, it could not be even taken as a proof of maturity in the comprehension of the problems. In fact, many privacy problems are becoming more intractable now in the modern online ecosystem than decades ago, when privacy emerged as a problem of industrialized societies. Online privacy is enmeshed with the dynamics of technology innovations, and with the shape of today's IT market, it is also entangled with the often fragile economics of the online advertising sector. At present, privacy depends to customers bounded rationality and, to put it simple, to the fact that for an individual, to manage her own online privacy specifically and timely without sacrificing to reap the benefits of the online ecosystem would be just overwhelming in the current setting. In this chapter, we discuss some particularly critical factors contributing to the problem of managing today's online privacy, followed by an introduction to some technical issues. In particular, we present in more details the case of the data broker industry, rather than the much more publicized cases of governmental surveillance and Internet-based data-centric corporations, because of its relatively lesser media exposition combined with an indisputable relevance for citizens' privacy. The problem of the informed consent and the dubbed privacy control paradox is discussed too for its centrality in almost all privacy policies and still underrated weakness. This leads us to show the complex and multidimensional nature of online privacy and the implication on policy making. In the section on privacy and technologies, we address the problem of online privacy both at the application level—by describing the current techniques used to collect a user's browsing history—and at the communication level—by discussing the methods available to defend against traffic analysis. Then, we highlight the security and privacy issues of mobile health applications.

In recent years, large-scale computer networks have become an essential aspect of our daily computing environment. We often rely on a global information infrastructure for ebusiness activities such as home banking, ATM transactions, or shopping online. One of the main scientific and technological challenges in this setting has been to provide security to individuals who operate in possibly untrusted and unknown environments. However, beside threats directly related to computer intrusions, epidemic diffusion of malwares, and outright frauds conducted online, a more subtle though increasing erosion of individuals’ privacy has progressed and multiplied. Such an escalating violation of privacy has some direct harmful consequences—for example, identity theft has spread in recent years—and negative effects on the general perception of insecurity that many individuals now experience when dealing with online services. Nevertheless, protecting personal privacy from the many parties—business, government, social, or even criminal—that examine the value of personal information is an old concern of modern society, now increased by the features of the digital infrastructure. In this chapter, we address these privacy issues in the digital society from different points of view, investigating: The various aspects of the notion of privacy and the debate that the intricate essence of privacy has stimulated; the most common privacy threats and the possible economic aspects that may influence the way privacy is (and especially is not, in its current status) managed in most firms; the efforts in the computer science community to face privacy threats, especially in the context of distributed networks; and, the network-based technologies available to date to provide anonymity in user communications over a private network.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses net privacy from different viewpoints, from historical to technological. The very nature of the concept of privacy requires such an enlarged perspective because it often appears indefinite, being constrained into the tradeoff between the undeniable need of protecting personal information and the evident utility, in many contexts, of the availability of the same information. The digital society and the global interconnected infrastructure eased accessing and spreading of personal information; therefore, developing technical means and defining norms and fair usage procedures for privacy protection are now more demanding than in the past. This chapter also presents some of the more advanced solutions that research has developed to date, either for anonymizing stored data, hiding sensitive information in artificially inaccurate clusters, or introducing third parties and middleware in charge of managing online transactions and services in a privacy-aware fashion. Location privacy is a topic that has gained importance in recent years with the advent of mobile devices. Privacy over the Net and in the digital society does not look to be in good shape; the augmented sensibility of individuals to its erosion, the many scientific and technological efforts to introduce novel solutions, and a better knowledge of the problem with the help of fresh data contribute to stimulating the need for better protection and fairer use of personal information.