Online Privacy: Do you care for these findings ?

Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

UN General Assembly resolution 68/167 states, international human rights law provides the universal framework against which any interference in individual privacy rights must be assessed. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 17 provides that "no one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation." It further states that "Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

The right to privacy under international human rights law is not absolute, any instance of interference must be subject to a careful and critical assessment of its necessity, legitimacy and proportionality.

Special Rapporteur is an independent expert appointed by the Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a country situation or a specific human rights theme.

Mandate :
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Privacy/SR/Pages/SRPrivacyIndex.aspx

Empasise on integrating a gender perspective throughout the work 

A Survey done by World Wide Web Foundation on

Teenagers Use of Social Media and their Understanding of Privacy Issues in Developing Countries, reveal following findings.

• Teenagers use social media at least daily. Most check their accounts more than once a day.
• Young teenagers use social media largely to connect with friends and share content.
• They consider personal information as their most valued data.
• They are unaware that when using social media, they are sharing data beyond that which they input directly. ex. location, browsing history, and data through connected technologies.
• They grant public access to key personal information without restriction.
• They are aware that social media companies collect their personal.
• data, but are not knowledgeable or do not care about how these platforms use our data.
• They confirm that they browse through social media companies’ Terms of Service (ToS) but do not understand them and so do not see them as important.
• People view data privacy as being able to control whom they share data and information with.
• People consider the disclosure of their personal information to social media companies as a necessary condition for them to access the benefits of social media.
• People are are aware of the risks of providing their information to the public but feel powerless to protect themselves.

Questions to consider?

How this behavior of young people , could effect their privacy?
Can AI algorithms used on their data , could be used to curate content for them?
What technology level ethics, procedures and policies would help mitigation?
Will such regulation could affect innovation and economy ?

Academic Notes

Research Objective
To assesses how young people in low and middle-income countries use social media, how they behave online and how they view the risks associated with their use. It also looks at their understanding of the actions they can take to protect themselves and their privacy. The answers to these questions are important, not only to inform policies that protect users, but also to raise awareness among vulnerable users of potential privacy risks as well as the rights they have online.

Methodology
The research was conducted in highly urbanised city of Jakarta (Indonesia); the rural province of Bohol (The Philippines); and peri-urban counties in Kiambu and Machakos, neighbouring the capital city Nairobi (Kenya).

Data was collected among 100 senior high school students, aged 15-18, 50 male, and 50 female per area with, assuming a 95% degree of confidence and a +10/-10 margin of error. The respondents were selected using a multilevel clustered sampling technique.

Out of the 100 respondents surveyed, 10 student respondents (5 male,5 female) were randomly selected for key informant interviews. Interview transcripts were subjected to descriptive analysis while results from the interviews were coded to identify common themes and patterns regarding the  research questions.

Niranjan Meegammana
HR Researcher & Technologist
Digital Human Rights

http://webfoundation.org/docs/2018/08/WebFoundationSocialMediaPrivacyReport_Screen.pdf