The Exploitation of Web Navigation Data: Ethical Issues and Alternative Scenarios
This work addresses privacy and ethical concerns for users, companies, scientists, and governments in the context of web data exploitation, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing issues without introducing new technical solutions.
The paper examines the problem of users losing control over their private web navigation data due to collection by various entities, and presents alternative scenarios and suggestions to address the resulting ethical issues.
Nowadays, the users' browsing activity on the Internet is not completely private due to many entities that collect and use such data, either for legitimate or illegal goals. The implications are serious, from a person who exposes unconsciously his private information to an unknown third party entity, to a company that is unable to control its information to the outside world. As a result, users have lost control over their private data in the Internet. In this paper, we present the entities involved in users' data collection and usage. Then, we highlight what are the ethical issues that arise for users, companies, scientists and governments. Finally, we present some alternative scenarios and suggestions for the entities to address such ethical issues.