Internet technologies have made mass surveillance prevalent and much easier to carry out, while at the same time making personal privacy more difficult to protect. The ubiquity of personal data processing has raised public awareness about the infringement of information privacy. To protect users' information privacy, several initiatives have been developed to provide Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs). One of the most wellknown PETs is the Onion Router (Tor) network, which provides users with online anonymity. The Tor network is supported by a group of volunteers who contribute their resources to sustain the availability and quality of the service. However, Tor Volunteers may find themselves in a tough spot at times because Tor network is often monitored by law enforcement, which makes this PET community different from any other open-source initiatives. To explore this volunteer community's motivation for providing their services despite the risks, we conducted an online survey. Our study results reveal that one of the main motivations for these volunteers is to advocate and provide privacy for online users. In addition, Tor-relay operators report on their views about anonymous networks, the challenges they face, and how their belief in providing an opportunity for everyone to access information without interference or censorship is a key component of their volunteer participation.
In this study, we investigated the flow of information and potential privacy infringements in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) genetic testing services available online. We adopted Nissenbaum's framework of Contextual Integrity (CI) to examine six DTC companies' privacy policies, terms of use, and consent processes. Our analyses indicate that the flow of information within certain contexts of DTC services presents alarming privacy vulnerabilities. In this paper, we provide a new perspective that can be used when evaluating privacy vulnerabilities for a given DTC online genetic testing service. The sensitive and unique features of genetic information make privacy even more of an important consideration for this type of information than for other types of medical/health information. In addition, we have limited knowledge about the harmful consequences that can arise from privacy invasions, such as genetic information breaches, genome database hacking, and so forth. Therefore, we believe that further research and in-depth investigations from the information community are desperately needed to address the privacy of genetic information.
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