The 21st century has thus far proven to be the most open regarding private information in human history. Thanks to the rise of new technology, an individual’s personal data is now accessible to almost anyone with an Internet connection.
Accessing data about individuals online extends even further to potential employers, business clients or college admission boards, who can access data about anyone and often times use it to form opinions about them.
“When you do things online, it’s archived,” Director of Technology Karl Fisch said. “When you go online and do stuff, you reveal things about yourself.”
It is difficult for individuals to manage what is posted and said about them online, but nevertheless, many Internet users, especially when on social networking sites, are taking precautions to ensure that their Internet footprint is positive, or at least not detrimental.
“Whenever I put pictures online, I think about who might see them, and I also double, triple and quadruple check every status I post,” senior Sami Streifer said.
Personal data has also been turned into a multi-billion dollar industry. Where most companies make money selling products or services, websites such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and others make the vast majority of their money by collecting the private data they have on users and selling it to advertisers.
 According to a recent report by Forrester Research, companies inside the United States spend $2 billion annually to access personal information. Anything from family pictures posted online to a person’s location, precisely measured using geo-location sensors in smartphones with Internet access, can all be sold to advertisers with the intent of creating targeted marketing.
 In 2011, Facebook made $3.2 billion from advertisers paying to access the personal data people share on the website. However, that is still considerably less than the $36.5 billion Google generated during that same year by selling the information gathered through Gmail and web searches.  
 “We may combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services,” Google said in its recently updated privacy policy.
 The third parties referred to are not necessarily limited to advertisers, either. Many law enforcement agents see this wealth of data as an opportunity to aid them in tracking potential offenders. LexisNexis, a company that provides computer-assisted legal research services, now offers a service called “Accurint for Law Enforcement,” which provides government agents with information about what individuals do on social network sites.
“Technology is changing people’s expectations of privacy,” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote during the recent case, United States v. Antoine Jones, which dealt with the warrantless use of GPS systems to track a private citizen. “Suppose we look forward 10 years, and maybe 10 years from now 90 percent of the population will be using social networking sites, and they will have on average 500 friends, and they will have allowed their friends to monitor their location 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through the use of their cell phones. What would the expectation of privacy be then?”
Many countries all around the world have enacted laws that protect an individual’s Internet privacy. Last month, the European Union implemented comprehensive privacy legislation, which, among other elements, requires web companies to acquire consent before using a person’s private information and provides the ability for an individual to have his or her information deleted by request.
 “In a free and open society, there is no way to get rid of the negative,” Fisch said. “Just like how before we had online stuff, you had written records. We have the same [system] now, it’s just really amplified.”
The United States has yet to pass any federal laws regarding Internet privacy as comprehensive as Europe’s, so one’s online footprint is still primarily controlled by individuals and the decisions they make. Many private corporations have tried to profit from this opportunity by providing services that manage the personal information.
Transparency has replaced the relative secrecy of past generations as the new norm and the continued technological developments have indicated that privacy will only become more difficult to protect in the future. This is 21st Century privacy.