Internet Privacy: At Home and At Work

Abstract

This paper is a summary of the tutorial on Internet privacy. The objective of the tutorial is to inform users of the Internet how and why their use of the Internet can be monitored. The focus of the tutorial will be Internet privacy at home and in the work place. The tutorial has three major sections: Technical Background, At Home and At Work. The At Home section is concerned with personal privacy infringement. This section will detail who would be interested in personal privacy infringement, how they would accomplish it, and for what purpose. This portion presents topics such as cookies and their uses and log files. In addition the At Home section discusses techniques to avoid privacy infringement (e.g. anonymizers, cookie cutter). The At Work section is concerned with employee surveillance. The topics discussed include who would be interested in this surveillance, how this surveillance would be done and for what purpose. The At Work section also discusses the concept of Acceptable Use Policies (AUP). Questions address: What purpose do AUP serve? How do AUP support or detract from employee surveillance? Both sections require a bit of technical expertise to understand how Internet activity can be monitored. The Technical Background section reviews the client/server paradigm of web computing, the important details of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and presents an overview of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). These concepts are necessary to understand how Internet activity con be monitored.