Changes in the delivery of books, music, and television extended the technologies of surveillance beyond the office, blurring the boundaries between work and home. The same technologies that make it possible to download digitally stored books, songs, and movies directly onto computer hard drives or mobile devices could make it possible for publishers and entertainment companies to record and monitor each individual’s browsing habits with unsettling specificity. Television too is being redesigned to create precise records of viewing habits. For instance, digital video recorders make it possible to store hours of television programs and enable viewers to skip commercials and to create their own program lineups. The data generated by such actions could create viewer profiles, which could then be used to make viewing suggestions and to record future shows.

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Privacy of cell phone communication also has become an issue, especially with the advent of nearly undetectable spyware and the professed need by national governments to monitor criminals who used wireless communications. The controversy over Pegasus spyware is a prime case in point. The Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group (founded in 2010) created the smartphone-attached spyware for eavesdropping on phones and harvesting their data (including calls, texts, photos, passwords, and locations). The company claims its product, which can steal private data without leaving an obvious trace of its actions, is sold exclusively to government security and law enforcement agencies and only for the purpose of aiding rescue operations and battling criminals, such as money launderers, sex- and drug-traffickers, and terrorists. Yet, Pegasus has been used to track politicians, government leaders, human rights activists, dissidents, and journalists. The Saudi Arabian government used it to track Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. Months before Khashoggi’s murder and dismemberment by Saudi agents in October 2018, Pegasus had been attached to the phone of Khashoggi’s wife.

The United States is not immune to these controversies. In 2010 Pres. Barack Obama’s administration said that in order to prevent terrorism and identify criminals, it wanted Congress to require that all Internet services be capable of complying with wiretap orders. The broad requirement would include Internet phone services, social networking services, and other types of Internet communication, and it would enable even encrypted messages to be decoded and read—something that required considerable time and effort. Critics complained that the monitoring proposal challenged the ideals of privacy and the lack of centralized authority for which the Internet had long been known.

Photos and videos also emerged as unexpected threats to personal privacy. “Geotags” are created when photos or videos are embedded with geographic location data from GPS chips inside cameras, including those in cell phones. When images are uploaded to the Internet, the geotags allow homes or other personal locations within the images to be precisely located by those who view the photos online. The security risk is not widely understood by the public, however, and in some cases disabling the geotag feature in certain models of digital cameras and camera-equipped smartphones is complicated.

Google’s Street View photo-mapping service caused privacy concerns when the company disclosed that it had been recording locations and some data from unprotected household wireless networks as it took pictures. The company said that the data had been gathered inadvertently. German officials objected to Google’s actions on the basis of Germany’s strict privacy laws, and, although German courts decided against the objections, Google did not expand its Street View service in Germany beyond the handful of urban centres that it had already photo-mapped. The controversy led to other investigations of the Street View service by several U.S. states and the governments of several countries (including the Czech Republic, which eventually refused to grant Google permission to offer the Street View service there).

The social network Facebook has been a particular focus of privacy concerns on the Internet. Over the lifetime of the site, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s information evolved from most content being accessible only to a user’s friends or friends of friends to being accessible to everyone. In December 2009 Facebook rolled out a new privacy settings update that allowed users to exercise more “granular” control over what personal information was shared or displayed. However, the labyrinthine nature of the various privacy-control menus discouraged use of the new privacy settings. Users tended to fall back on Facebook’s default settings, which, because of the expansion of Facebook’s “opt-out” policy, were at the loosest level of security, forcing users to “opt-in” to make information private. Responding to criticism, Facebook revised its privacy policy again in May 2010, with a simplified system that consolidated privacy settings onto a single page.

Another privacy issue is cyberbullying—using the Internet to threaten or humiliate another person with words, photos, or videos. The problem received particular attention in 2010 when a male Rutgers University student committed suicide after two acquaintances reportedly streamed a video over the Internet of the student having a sexual encounter with a man. Also in 2010, Donna Witsell, the mother of a 13-year-old Florida girl who had committed suicide in 2009 after a cyberbullying incident, formed a group called Hope’s Warriors to help curb abuse and to warn others of the threat. Most U.S. states have enacted laws against bullying, although very few of them include cyberbullying.