Sample Worksheet - Privacy, Spam and Encryption

[The Internet and Privacy article]

Read the articles "The Internet's Challenge to Privacy" and "On-line Groups Are Offering Up Privacy Plans" in order to answer the questions on this worksheet.
  1. What is the Platform for Privacy Preferences?
  2. What is a cookie file and where are they stored?
  3. How is privacy handled in the European Union?
  4. What does the ACM Code of Ethics or the IEEE Code of Ethics say about privacy?
  5. Why was the inclusion of a person's mother's maiden name in P-Trak such an outrage to people?
[Discussion Questions for the Internet and Privacy article]
  1. Do you agree with George Lawton that people stay away from the Internet because they fear their behavior can be monitored or do you think people stay away because they think their credit card numbers will be stolen?
  2. Do you think that on-line companies can and will regulate themselves or should the U.S. Government form a governing body for the use of all personal data?
  3. In the past the Clinton Administration has been strongly opposed to the export of U.S. encryption algorithms. Is this a good policy? Enforceable? Reasonable?
  4. Should on-line companies treat children different from adults in the type of questions that they ask them? How can a company determine if a child or adult is browsing their web pages?
  5. Should people be told how their personal data will be used before being asked for it by on-line companies?
  6. Should cookie files be outlawed? What about the private databases that use temporary cookie files to establish that a request comes from a legitimate user? Private databases ask the user to log in with a user id and password. Then some of these databases use cookie files to authenticate a new request from the same user. Since the connection between the WWW server and client is dropped after each request this saves the user from logging in multiple times.
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