section_path: Internet
section_name: Internet
paragraph_text: Internet
  
  The Internet and technologies built on it enable new forms of social interactions at increasingly faster speeds and larger scales. Because the computer networks which underlie the Internet introduce such a wide range of novel security concerns, the discussion of privacy on the Internet is often conflated with security. Indeed, many entities such as corporations involved in the surveillance economy inculcate a security-focused conceptualization of privacy which reduces their obligations to uphold privacy into a matter of regulatory compliance, while at the same time lobbying to minimize those regulatory requirements.
  
  The Internet's effect on privacy includes all of the ways that computational technology and the entities that control it can subvert the privacy expectations of their users. In particular, the right to be forgotten is motivated by both the computational ability to store and search through massive amounts of data as well as the subverted expectations of users who share information online without expecting it to be stored and retained indefinitely. Phenomena such as revenge porn and deepfakes are not merely individual because they require both the ability to obtain images without someone's consent as well as the social and economic infrastructure to disseminate that content widely. Therefore, privacy advocacy groups such as the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and the Electronic Frontier Foundation argue that addressing the new privacy harms introduced by the Internet requires both technological improvements to encryption and anonymity as well as societal efforts such as legal regulations to restrict corporate and government power.
  
  While the Internet began as a government and academic effort up through the 1980s, private corporations began to enclose the hardware and software of the Internet in the 1990s, and now most Internet infrastructure is owned and managed by for-profit corporations. As a result, the ability of governments to protect their citizens' privacy is largely restricted to industrial policy, instituting controls on corporations that handle communications or personal data. Privacy regulations are often further constrained to only protect specific demographics such as children, or specific industries such as credit card bureaus.