Background

A portion of the web economy depends on legal surveillance of people including social media posts, scanning emails, tracking website visits, browser search history, network geolocation, device profiling, device fingerprinting, entertainment watched, purchases, subscriptions, health tracking, political affiliation, donations, employment, residence, occupation, age, gender, and interests. There is also an illegal side that takes advantage of available online personal identity information coupled with hacked, leaked, or stolen information from retailers, government agencies, online services, and personal devices.

This surveillance invades every aspect of our lives including habits, lending, spending, to whom we are communicating with, where we go, how we travel, thoughts, preferences, and ideas. A lot can be learned about a person through surveilling web searches. Technology has gone far beyond inferring what a person is searching for through keyword analysis or lexical search. Technology can now understand a person’s intent, context, and emotions through semantic search, contextual search, and affective artificial intelligence, respectively. Advances in technology are ensuring that each person’s privacy reservoir is porous.

A great deal of this siphoned activity related to personal habits is difficult to stop as vendors build siphons into their products and bury the approval in their terms of service that must be accepted by the end user to use their product. The justification usually falls into the categories of security, safety, convenience, automation, “help us improve,” or “to better serve you.” Never mind that user information is being sold/used/shared by vendors for profit.

A person’s expectation of communication privacy is multifaceted. While a person may have been warned of being recorded/monitored to use a call center, hotline, or chatbot, it’s fair to assume that didn’t mean carte blanch approval to use their information for any purpose or sell their information to third parties. But with a simple accept click or tap, privacy is out the door. And there may be no warning at the time of the communication regarding privacy, as that right to privacy was stripped in advance when signing up for a communications platform or accepting the terms of service for a website.

There are products to bolster privacy for some facets of communication, such as, web browsing and searching. DuckDuckGo is a web browser and search engine that does not track your online activity or personal information. Web browsers can be used in conjunction with a VPN service to obfuscate a person’s network geolocation. But vendor’s websites can still ask for your location “to better serve you” to put you in a virtual brick and mortar store closest to you. If you purchase a product and enter a home address, ship-to address, phone number, and credit card number, the vendor has peeled your privacy onion.

Internet protocol HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) helps to secure data communications and authenticate websites. While this is a solution for data transport, it doesn’t solve the greater problem of insecure data at rest, both on the client side and server/business side. The data at a business may be vulnerable to hacking or an employee with the right credentials stealing data. Data on a client may be stolen or exposed by: malware, stealing a device, allowing access to the wrong person, authorities confiscating devices, automated sharing between devices, automated backup to the cloud, or unintended sharing between clients. And while websites may be authenticated, it doesn’t solve the problem of authenticating communicating parties and communications being open to phishing, spoofing, and other attacks. Some forms of communications may not be protectable, like using a call center / hotline from a phone, where an analog voice can be converted to text, which is then data that an artificial intelligence engine can then infer why a person called, the intent of the call, the emotional state of the caller, and if the caller is satisfied with the reply.

Personal and business communications should have an expectation of privacy and be protected. This isn’t possible today, with the web economy pitted against privacy in the monetization of communications. A solution is needed to protect common/daily communications, such as video, audio, photo, and image sharing; multimedia messaging; texting; video telephony; Internet Protocol telephony; and email that ensures privacy, makes impersonation obvious, and successful hacking impossible.