Privacy concerns increasingly under the spotlight

In the last few weeks, a couple of initiatives in the UK have caught the eye of privacy advocates: first, the government proposal of making Internet Service Providers responsible for taking legal action against users who download music illegally over their accounts, thus making them actively responsible for monitoring the content which is passed through their networks. Second, the proposal of entering every child into an electronic database which will collect and permanently store students’ records so that these can be accessible to college admissions and prospective employers. Interestingly, these proposals are made just as users’ concerns are growing about social networking sites’ ability of making users’ personal data available to third parties, via Facebook’s applications for example, and about the permanence of such data once they are stored and archived on the site’s servers.