The aim of the thesis was to find out what information of personal and impersonal nature users provide to Google in exchange for free use of its services and what image of digital identity can be compiled from this information. Since the concept of digital identity can be interpreted in different ways, its meaning is first determined for the purposes of this study. For a better understanding of the subject is further described a brief history and present of Google and the services it offers. Range of digital identity is influenced by the company's policy on the collection and storage of user data. For this reason, it is discussed in a separate chapter. The next part presents tools for managing digital identity available within the user account. In the practical part the real user data from all services associated with the user account were analyzed.

The text is concerned with informational privacy in infosphere. Infosphere according to Luciano Floridi presents a new type of techno-scientific ecology in which western societies organize themselves and operate. Privacy is conceptualized as a labor of division in the infosphere, where every (quasi)subject is mobilizing various actors in order to protect her outer boundaries and resist objectification. The labor of division in infosphere is then compared with similar types of labor in different ecologies and societies (i.e. Amazonia and Mongolia) in sake of identification of crucial agents carrying out this labor of division based on negotiations of categories such as human/non-human or self/non-self. The text distinguishes three types of actors of division according to three interconnected intruders; traders, overseers and criminals. The argument then is that through mobilization of various dividing actors depending on the type of intruder, different (quasi)subjects emerge, thus subjectivity in the infosphere is a political project co- constructed by non/human dividing actors. The last chapter than proposes general ethical directions which might be helpful in the future, when considering the problems of lack of privacy.

Bibliographic note: PRIJATEL, Alan J. The Right to Privacy Deconstructed: International Law in an Age of Virtual Surveillance, 72p. Master's Thesis. Univerzita Karlova (Charles University), Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Studies: Prague, Supervisor: JU. Dr Milan Lipovský, Ph.D. Abstract: In order to understand the process to which the right to privacy operates under current international and regional legal frameworks, we ask ourselves the question if "the digital age" merits an interpretation of privacy unique to this phenomenon of cyberspace. If indeed the right to privacy can be interpreted in this way, we ask whether or not there is a deficit to legal protections to the. This "right to privacy in the digital age" will be taken in context of international law, conventions, principles, and norms in addition to being explored in case-law from the European Court of Human Rights to draw an understanding of the right to privacy in the digital age- if any such right does indeed exist. This thesis essentially, as the title implies, "deconstructs" what puts together the right to privacy and examines what parts of the law that was intended to fortify privacy in the first place, has shortcomings to its defense. I am arguing that there indeed are normative deficits to the right to privacy. In...

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / With the development of information and network technologies, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) management system has gained wide spread application in managing medical records. One of the major challenges of EHRs is the independent nature of medical institutions. This non-collaborative nature puts a significant barrier between patients, doctors, medical researchers and medical data. Moreover, unlike the unique and strong anti-tampering nature of traditional paper-based records, electronic health records stored in centralization database are vulnerable to risks from network attacks, forgery and tampering. In view of the data sharing difficulties and information security problems commonly found in existing EHRs, this dissertation designs and develops a credible Blockchain-based electronic health records (CB-EHRs) management system.

Usage rates of blogs, social media, and online courses have been exponentially increasing in the last decade, especially among the college student population (Knight-McCord, et al., 2016). While the benefits of these platforms, including connectivity, visibility, social feedback, persistence, and accessibility are attractive to students as an online learning tool, there is a rising concern regarding privacy and confidentiality. This study aimed to investigate how students’ privacy and confidentiality concerns and attitudes influence their participation level and degree of openness within an online learning environment. Communication privacy management (CPM) theory served as the theoretical framework for this study in order to focus on understanding the way people perceive and manage privacy, both personally and with others. A quantitative correlational research design was selected for this study to examine the relationship between privacy concerns among students enrolled in a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate program at a Midwestern university and their participation levels within blogs, social media, and online courses. The quantitative software package SPSS was used to conduct multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to test for the statistical significance of the variables.

According to eMarketer, the total advertising spend in US alone was estimated to be over $238 billion. Firms invest large amounts of money in advertising to promote and inform consumers about their products and services, as well as to persuade them to purchase. The broad theme of advertising has been examined from many different angles in the marketing literature, ranging from empirically measuring effects of TV ads on sales to analytically characterizing the key economic forces stemming from enhanced targetability in online advertising. The purpose of my dissertation is to study some of the key questions which remain unaddressed in the advertising literature. In the first essay, I examine firms' choices of advertising content in a competitive setting. I demonstrate that competitive forces sometimes induces firms to choose advertising content that shifts consumers' perception of product quality. While this strategy hurts firms in a monopoly setting, it increases their profits under competition because it may increase the utility of their offering in comparison with the competing offering. In the second essay, I investigate the optimal mechanism for selling online ads in a learning environment. Specifically, I show that when ad sellers, such as Google, design their ad auctions, it is optimal for them to favor new advertisers in the auction in order to expedite learning their ad performance. In the third essay, I study the impact of tracking consumers' Internet activities on the online advertising ecosystem in the presence of regulations that, motivated by privacy concerns, endow consumers with the choice to have their online activity be tracked or not. I find that when ad effectiveness is intermediate, fewer ads are shown to opt-in consumers, who can be tracked and have their funnel stages inferred by advertisers, than to opt-out consumers, who cannot be tracked. In this case, consumers trade-off the benefit of seeing fewer ads by opting-in to tracking (positive instrumental value of privacy) with the disutility they feel from giving up their privacy (intrinsic cost of privacy). Overall, these findings shed light on novel strategic forces that provide guidance for marketers' advertising decisions in three distinct contexts.

As the concept of the Smart Home is being embraced globally, IoT devices such as the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Nest Thermostat are becoming a part of more and more households. In the data-driven world we live in today, internet service providers (ISPs) and companies are collecting large amounts of data and using it to learn about their customers. As a result, it is becoming increasingly important to understand what information ISPs are capable of collecting. IoT devices in particular exhibit distinct behavior patterns and specific functionality which make them especially likely to reveal sensitive information. Collection of this data provides valuable information and can have some serious privacy implications. In this work I present an approach to fingerprinting IoT devices behind private networks while only examining last-mile internet traffic . Not only does this attack only rely on traffic that would be available to an ISP, it does not require changes to existing infrastructure. Further, it does not rely on packet contents, and therefore works despite encryption. Using a database of 64 million packets logged over 15 weeks I was able to train machine learning models to classify the Amazon Echo Dot, Amazon Echo Show, Eufy Genie, and Google Home consistently. This approach combines unsupervised and supervised learning and achieves a precision of 99.95\%, equating to one false positive per 2,000 predictions. Finally, I discuss the implication of identifying devices within a home.

Monitoring of employees in the decision-making practice of Labour inspectorates Abstract The theme of the thesis is employee monitoring conducted by employers. The applicable law permits the employee monitoring but imposes restrictions to it. Every employer shall consider thoroughly whether he fulfills the conditions required to implement the employee monitoring or not. The thesis introduces the reader to the legal framework of employee monitoring in the first place. It enlists relevant regulation and defines key terms which are necessary to understand the employee monitoring, such as privacy, surveillance, personal data etc. The key terms are often vague and thus difficult to interpret. The author then examines the provision of Section 316 Subsection 1 of the Labour Code in-depth. The Section prohibits the employees to use the employer's means for their personal needs. It also authorizes the employer to check compliance with the aforementioned prohibition. The relationship between first and second subsection of Section 316 of the Labour Code is also evaluated. The next part of the thesis describes employee monitoring which interferes with employees' privacy and which is regulated by Section 316 Subsection 2 of the Labour Code. The author researches which employers may conduct the monitoring, which reasons...

<p>QC 20131118</p>

<p>QC 20131115</p>