The event was hosted jointly by the Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology and Society and the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection.
"Are we really invisible when we're online?" film and television studies professor Mark Williams asked the audience during the discussion. "What I want to call for is more and better opportunities to be self-conscious about what we do online."
While the problems of technology and privacy are not new, the number of privacy concerns has risen exponentially with the increased use of computers, philosophy professor James Moor said.
Moor stressed the importance of educating people about how information is shared via computers and what kinds of information are distributed. People are especially prone to sharing personal information on social networking sites like Facebook, Moor said.
"If you put it out on Facebook, you have no expectations of privacy," Moor said. "There is some burden on the user. That's why it's important to educate, especially children, how to employ privacy settings."
Moor also emphasized the need for new policies to protect users from breeches of privacy.
"We are faced with all kinds of opportunities to share information, and we don't know what to do with that," Charles Palmer, chief technical officer of security and privacy at IBM and strategic adviser to I3P, said.
People disclose a lot of information involuntarily, creating the potential for abuse, Palmer said.
"Perhaps it's like every time you swipe your passport at a foreign airport you don't know," Palmer said. "We don't necessarily know what the data is collected for."
Information posted on social networking sites, for example, can be used in the hiring process, raising concerns that employers are crossing an ethical line, according to discussion moderator Denise Anthony, sociology department chair and the research director for ISTS.
"I would say that these days [corporations] would be somewhat negligent to not utilize that way of looking into someone's behavior," said Hans Brechbuhl, professor of business administration at the Tuck School of Business. "I don't think the phenomenon involved in it is all that different than normal-records-hacking they would have done in the past."
Panelists highlighted BoredatBaker as evidence of the harmful effects of information sharing.
