No matter how many privacy settings a website may have, a user’s activity is anything but private.

From January to June, the U.S. government made 7,969 requests for user data from Google, according to the most recent Google Transparency Report. This number is one that has steadily risen in the past few years, according to past reports.

Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech, said there is no way to know if anyone is monitoring an individual’s Internet activity or, if they are, which activities they are monitoring.

“We really don’t know what the government is doing as far as keeping tabs on the Internet,” Gutterman said. “That’s part of the nature of the Internet, is that we don’t know who is monitoring, if anyone is monitoring and even if the government is monitoring.”

One can expect some reasonable sort of privacy with his or her computer, the same as any other of their personal possessions, he said.

The government has to use search warrants to collect information from a computer, just as it would in other searches, Gutterman said.

But the government is able to do cumulative searches, called data mining, where it can collect huge amounts of data and than backtrack toward leads in that manner, Gutterman said.

And there is information available everywhere. For each website visited, or each email sent, there is a record. People forget that social media platforms are also open, public atmospheres, where postings can be monitored, he said.

“Some people still do believe that you have complete anonymity in cyber space, and that’s a myth,” Gutterman said.

There have been cases at Syracuse University where the Department of Public Safety knew ahead of time where parties would be because students posted about them and made them open events, he said.

“The only way to avoid really any sort of scrutiny from advertisers or commercial bankers, or even law enforcement, is to stay off the grid,” Gutterman said.

Milton Mueller, a professor in the School of Information Studies, also said he thought there was nothing people could technologically do to protect themselves from surveillance.

The recent scandal surrounding General David Petraeus, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, shows it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to hide his or her Internet activity. Petraeus didn’t even send out emails; the FBI was able to uncover deleted drafts, Mueller said.

Encryption is one method people use to try to protect their emails, he said, but once the emails reach their target server, they are decrypted so they can be read, making them once again susceptible to monitoring. But most people aren’t capable of encrypting their files anyway, Mueller said.

While people can’t protect themselves through technology, Mueller said people can work to protect themselves by reforming policies and laws.

Citizens can advocate for stronger regulations on how the government accesses data. One such piece of legislation that should be updated is the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a piece of legislation that was written in 1986, he said.

One of the big problems is that today, search engines and websites, especially social media, Mueller said, can store information ranging from past searches to events scheduled on calendars and all of it can be traced to someone’s computer.

“Obviously they don’t let just anybody get access to (information), but if they’re presented with a valid warrant or search warrant or subpoena from the government, they will turn that information over,” he said.

Search warrants used to be targeted at specific, limited kinds of information, but now when the government makes a legal request, it receives much more information, Mueller said.

Said Mueller: “Changing technology has simply expanded the ability of people to keep track of what you do in ways that have outstripped the legal protection.”

Published on November 26, 2012 at 11:45 pm

Contact Andrew: amfeld01@syr.edu