About This Site

The rights guaranteed to United States citizens by the U.S. Constitution include free speech, anonymous speech, freedom not to speak, freedom from unreasonable search and the assurance of conditions favorable to individual liberty. These rights refer not only to protection from government actions, but from any entity seeking to compromise that which is guaranteed by the Constitution to each citizen of the United States.

The creation of cyberspace changed the concepts of space and time, and challenged the notion of privacy in an environment composed of bits and bytes of information. At the heart of the issues surrounding privacy in cyberspace is the question of whether or not the current legal framework constructed to protect privacy in the traditional media can be applied to the environment of the Internet. Does increased technological ability to conduct surveillance translate into decreased privacy for citizens online? It would seem that the Internet's legacy of initially being a public forum will remain, despite the fact that it has been privatized for commercial uses. The following web pages explore surveillance and online tracking methods commonly used as well as legislation that is being used to validate these procedures.

This web site has been created to fulfill the group project requirement for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's course "Cyberspace and the Mass Media," taught by Professor George Tuck, Summer 2003.

Three areas and the way each relates to online privacy are explored: government policy, advertising/cookies and spyware/tracking systems. Each area has been researched by one of three team members: government policy by Devon Cadwell Bazata. graduate student; advertising/cookies by Cherie Krueger, graduate student; spyware/tracking systems by Yang Burhanuddin, undergraduate student.

The issue of online privacy can be addressed by corporations or individuals in several different ways. Support for online privacy and comments on its current state of regulation can be provided to the public policy legislators involved in proposing new legislation and amending what's currently in existence. Tracking is done by outside sources like advertising and marketing organizations, government sources as well as inside sources such as the self tracking systems like covenanteyes.com. Users can utilize technological approaches such as installation of firewall hardware and computer reconfiguration that block ads and the user information that is gathered via the cookies ads place on computers to safeguard privacy. And lastly, strategic measures such as using an Internet Service Provider with a privacy policy against user information disclosure, and/or by masking the computer's TCP/IP address by using an anonymous browsing service, can be employed.

In addition to information and links for each of these three areas, links to relevant web sites and news stories can be found in the Useful Links section to the left.