Internet Privacy: At Home and At Work

Abstract

This paper is a tutorial on Internet privacy. The objective of the tutorial is to inform users of the Internet how and why their use of the Internet can be monitored. The focus of the tutorial is Internet privacy at home and in the work place. The tutorial contains three major sections: Technical Background, Privacy At Home and Privacy At Work. The At Home section is concerned with personal privacy infringement. This section details who would be interested in personal privacy infringement, for what purpose, and how they would accomplish it. The At Home section also discusses techniques on how to avoid privacy infringement. The At Work section is concerned with employee surveillance. Topics discussed include who would be interested in this surveillance, for what purpose, and how this surveillance would be carried out. The At Work section also discusses the concept of an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) Both of these sections require a bit of technical expertise to understand how Internet activity can be monitored. The Technical Background section and the Appendix review the client/server paradigm of web computing, the important details of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and presents an overview of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). These concepts are necessary to understand how Internet activity can be monitored.