Privacy advocates may be winning the battle

Mark Zuckerberg said in 2010 that privacy was no longer a “social norm.” But four years later, the pendulum might be ready to swing the other way.

The second generation of digital citizens - teenagers and millennials, who have spent most, if not all, of their lives online - appear to be more likely to embrace the tools of privacy and protect their personal information.

Disappearing-message apps like Snapchat and Cyber Dust have been embraced by young people who aren’t eager to leave too much of a digital footprint. Video apps like Vine and Instagram let you create an edited version of your world instead of uploading all your personal details.

Even Facebook, despite years of resistance, recently changed its default for new posts from “public” to “friends” and introduced tools that let you easily untag yourself in other people’s photos and change old posts from public to friends-only.
“Previously there had been a sort of undue trust in the magic of cloud services,” said Justin Brookman, director of the Consumer Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. “People are starting to reconsider that.”

“For some people, the results will be that we don’t have any privacy and we should get over that,” he said. “But I don’t think people want that. We’ve seen the younger generation search out tools that let them communicate in more private ways.”
These tools aren’t foolproof, but they speak to an interest in sharing less freely and being more judicious.

Devices like the Blackphone also offer expanded tools for protecting your privacy, like encryption of data and more secure app management, that could trickle into mainstream products.

And regulatory pressure in the United States and Europe may be forcing companies to think twice about what they do with personal information.

“You’re seeing more pressure on companies to be more explicit about what they’re doing with your data,” Brookman said. “But a lot of companies would just as soon fly under the radar. Requiring real transparency and real choice would help a lot in these matters.”

There may be only so much we can do to protect ourselves against hackers bent on stealing our information, of course, as some celebrities appeared  to discover last week.

You can create stronger passwords and enable things like multifactor authentication, which adds steps to logging into an online account.

Sure, a person wearing Google Glass could be surreptitiously recording your conversations or actions in public. But many losses of online privacy are self-inflicted. It doesn’t help if you willingly share information with other people - and companies - on social media.

Your phone may also be tracking your precise location and compiling a complete record of your whereabouts. The ads you click on and your search history paint a picture of what you buy, what interests you and what ails you.

Even your email and personal messages may be fair game. Google said in a 2013 court filing that users had no reasonable expectation that their email communications are confidential.

That’s a wind-up to say that for young people - and maybe even some of the older ones - there is plenty of data pointing to a need to think twice about their online behaviour.

Last year, the Pew Research Center reported that 86 percent of Internet users had taken some kind of steps to avoid being tracked online, even though almost 60 percent of them thought that online anonymity was impossible.

They might be right about anonymity, but others might still argue that keeping at least some privacy is worth a shot.