Jillian, a Grade 12 student, does most of her shopping online. So much of her time is taken up by her classes, extra-curricular activities, and the part-time job she has to save money for university that she just doesn’t have time to set foot in a mall or a store. Besides, online shopping is so convenient! She can order clothes, cosmetics and especially books. In fact, every time she goes to Congo.com they have a page of recommended books for her. She’s impressed by how good their recommendations have been, and they just seem to get more accurate the more books she buys.

When she has a little time to relax, Jillian likes to flake out and read cheesy magazines. She was able to get a cheap subscription to her favourite ones through Congo.com, and she’s signed up to be able to read more for free online. The only problem is that lately she’s started getting all kinds of junk mail, both spam and postal mail. She’s even getting telemarketing calls at home, and spam text messages on her cell phone! She asks her mother about it and her mother says the magazine publisher probably sold her name to other companies.

Jillian starts thinking about all of the advertising she sees when she’s online. She’d never noticed before how much the advertisers seem to know about her – she’s always seeing ads for dating services that promise to introduce her to boys in her town, for instance. Even when she goes to Web sites that have nothing to do with shopping, they’re full of banner ads and pop-ups for the kinds of things she buys online. As an experiment, she decides to add “Skateboarding” to her list of hobbies on her social networking profile. Sure enough, within hours she’s seeing ads for skate magazines on the Web sites she visits.

She decides to go to Congo.com and read their privacy policy. It says that they won’t give out her personal information if she doesn’t want them to, but she has to say she doesn’t want them to, and they never asked when she signed up for her account. It also says that they have no control over what the companies that actually print the books and magazines will do with her information. It also says that they may gather information about her from other sites to improve their recommendations to her.

Jillian isn’t sure what to do. She doesn’t want to stop using Congo.com, or take down her social networking profile, but she feels uncomfortable giving out any more personal information. She worries, too, when she sees her younger sister signing up for Web sites she visits. A lot of them also have surveys that ask for more personal information about yourself and your family. By the time she is Jillian’s age, how much will advertisers know about her?

Questions

• Briefly summarize the events in this case study and list the issues it raises around privacy. (You should be able to identify at least three issues.)
  
  
• How serious do you think the issues raised here are? Why? Which is the most serious and why?
  
  
• Does this case study seem relevant to your own life? Why or why not?