One of the things that has had most of an impact on privacy in recent years is the internet. The internet has allowed people to communicate in ways that were previously thought not possible through various different websites including social media sites such as facebook or twitter. A large proportion of the population now uses these sites in order to communicate with other users and share content like photos with each other. This leaves many people with a large "digital footprint" meaning that they have a large amount of personal information on the internet and with both facebook and twitter encouraging users to make their their content more available to everyone else, facebook encourages users to use the "everyone" feature that makes posts by the user public. This, of course, can be a problem as it allows things such as identity theft to become easier as all of some users information is public allowing easy imitation and some users may have things that allow identity thieves to steal accounts through posting information that may answer their secret question/ answer combination such as a pets name or a hometown etc..
Britain recently opted out new european social media privacy laws that would allow users to delete their personal information from online service providers, allowing them to essential erase their tracks on the internet. This would not only allow for a greater level of privacy but also mean that around 27 separate laws concerning the issue would be replaced with just the one. Some of the concerns listed as reasons not to use the law is that it would be difficult to enforce as other users can just as easily download data that would be removed, such as photos, if it is made public meaning that there is a bit of a grey area when it comes to who actually owns the file due to its distribution. As the laws are set to be european wide and will created if there is a majority vote, Britain may be forced to comply with the law should it pass.
