Study guide
12.2 Privacy Risks of Communications Technologies: Video Calls, Messaging, Mobile Devices, Social Media, and Gaming
Certified Information Privacy Technologist CIPT
Track your progress as you read
Finished sections get a check mark.
1 Chapter 1: CIPT Exam Overview and Study Plan
1.1 CIPT Exam Facts, Blueprint, and Study Plan
2 Chapter 2: The Privacy Technologist's Legal and Procedural Role
2.1 Privacy Function Roles: DPO, Data Owner, Steward, Custodian, Legal, and Security 2.2 Translating Legal and Regulatory Requirements into Technical Controls 2.3 Notices, Policies, and Oversight of Privacy Operations, Audits, and Third Parties
3 Chapter 3: Technical Responsibilities: Risk Concepts and Incident Response
3.1 Risk Concepts: Threat, Vulnerability, Attack, Exploit, and Privacy Risk 3.2 Technical Support for Privacy Incident and Breach Response
4 Chapter 4: Privacy Risk Models, Frameworks, and Threat Models
4.1 Privacy Risk Models and Frameworks: Contextual Integrity, Calo, Solove, FIPPs, OECD, NIST, and FAIR 4.2 Privacy Threat Models: LINDDUN and MITRE PANOPTIC
5 Chapter 5: Data Ethics and Automated Decision-Making
5.1 Legal Versus Ethical Processing and the Social Impact of Privacy-Affecting Designs 5.2 Identifying and Minimizing Bias in Automated Decision-Making
6 Chapter 6: Minimizing Privacy Risk During Data Collection
6.1 Notice, Consent Management, and Choice Architecture 6.2 Managing Privacy Risk in Automatic Collection and Telemetry 6.3 Extracting Personal Data from Publicly Available Sources 6.4 Data Retention, Destruction, and Cryptographic Erasure 6.5 Data Minimization Techniques 6.6 Implementing Data Processing Segregation
7 Chapter 7: Minimizing Privacy Risk During Data Use: Aggregation, PETs, and Secondary Use
7.1 Minimizing Privacy Risk from Aggregation and Inference 7.2 De-identification, Pseudonymization, and Tokenization 7.3 Microdata Protection: k-Anonymity, l-Diversity, and t-Closeness 7.4 Advanced PETs: Differential Privacy, Secure Multi-Party Computation, and Homomorphic Encryption 7.5 Secondary Use, Function Creep, and Purpose Limitation Controls
8 Chapter 8: Minimizing Privacy Risk During Dissemination
8.1 Disclosure and Accessibility Controls: APIs, Egress, and Clean Rooms 8.2 Countering Distortion, Exposure, Breach of Confidentiality, Blackmail, and Appropriation 8.3 Defense in Depth: Identity, Access Management, and Authentication
9 Chapter 9: Intrusion, Decisional Interference, and Dark Patterns
9.1 Minimizing Intrusion and Decisional Interference: Behavioral Advertising, Profiling, Cyberbullying, and Social Engineering 9.2 Dark Patterns and Deceptive Design
10 Chapter 10: Privacy Risks Related to Software Security
10.1 Detecting and Fixing Software Privacy Vulnerabilities 10.2 Intrusion Detection and Prevention, and Privacy in Change Management 10.3 Service Providers, Third-Party SDKs, and Supply Chain Risk
11 Chapter 11: Tracking and Surveillance Technologies
11.1 Privacy Risks and Impacts of E-Commerce 11.2 Audio and Video Surveillance, Wearables, and IoT 11.3 Privacy Issues Around Biometrics: Facial, Voice, Fingerprint, and DNA Data 11.4 Privacy Risks and Impacts of Location Tracking 11.5 Internet Monitoring and Web Tracking: Cookies, Fingerprinting, and GPC
12 Chapter 12: Workplace Technologies: AI, Communications, and Monitoring
12.1 Identifying and Minimizing Privacy Risks in AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning 12.2 Privacy Risks of Communications Technologies: Video Calls, Messaging, Mobile Devices, Social Media, and Gaming 12.3 Workplace Monitoring and BYOD Privacy
13 Chapter 13: Monitoring and Managing Privacy Risk
13.1 Privacy Audits, IT Control Reviews, KRIs, and KPIs 13.2 Completing Privacy and Data Protection Impact Assessments
14 Chapter 14: Implementing Privacy by Design
14.1 Cavoukian's Seven Foundational Principles of Privacy by Design 14.2 Privacy Goals, Objectives, and Translating High-Level Specifications into Low-Level Specifications 14.3 Hoepman's Privacy Design Strategies: Data-Oriented Strategies 14.4 Hoepman's Privacy Design Strategies: Process-Oriented Strategies
15 Chapter 15: Evaluating Privacy Risks in User Experiences
15.1 Privacy in User Experience: UX Concepts and Usability Testing 15.2 Value Sensitive Design
16 Chapter 16: Privacy Engineering Objectives, Architecture, and the Development Life Cycle
16.1 NIST Privacy Engineering Objectives: Predictability, Manageability, and Disassociability 16.2 Enterprise Architecture, Data Flow Mapping, Lineage, and Cross-Border Transfers 16.3 Managing Privacy Risk in the Software Development Life Cycle 16.4 Applying LINDDUN Threat Modeling in Engineering
17 Chapter 17: Managing and Monitoring Privacy Controls
17.1 Data Inventories, Records of Processing Activities, and Asset Discovery 17.2 Privacy Code Review and Runtime Behavior Monitoring
12.2 Privacy Risks of Communications Technologies: Video Calls, Messaging, Mobile Devices, Social Media, and Gaming
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
Transport encryption protects data between device and server, while end-to-end encryption means only the participants' devices hold the keys; claiming E2EE without it is deceptive, as the FTC's 2020 Zoom order showed.
Even with end-to-end encryption, metadata such as who talks to whom, when, and how often can reveal relationships and must be minimized.
Meeting recordings and AI transcripts or summaries create new personal data that needs notice, consent where recording laws require it, access control, and retention limits.
Social media risks include public-by-default settings, contact importers that enable scraping (the 533 million-record Facebook dataset), tagging, and location in posts.
Gaming platforms combine children's data, voice and text chat with strangers, and in-game purchases; the FTC's 2022 Epic Games order included a $275 million COPPA penalty partly over default-on chat for children.
Last updated: October 2026
12.2 Privacy Risks of Communications Technologies: Video Calls, Messaging, Mobile Devices, Social Media, and Gaming
Quick Summary: The BoK asks technologists to identify and minimize privacy risks in video calls and conferencing, messaging, mobile devices, social media, and gaming platforms . These tools carry content (what people say) and metadata (who, when, where, how often). The core engineering questions are who holds the encryption keys, what metadata the service keeps, what recordings and transcripts are created, what is visible by default, and how children are protected.
Communications tools are used at work and at home, often on the same device. Employers choose and configure many of them (Section 12.3), which makes their privacy settings part of the organization's responsibility.
Encryption: Transport Versus End-to-End
Model Who Can Read Content Typical Use
Transport encryption (TLS) The service provider can read content on its servers Most web apps, email, many meeting services by default
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) Only participants' devices hold the keys; the provider sees ciphertext Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, E2EE meeting modes
Claims about encryption must be accurate. In 2020 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission alleged that Zoom had advertised "end-to-end, 256-bit encryption" while it could access meeting content; its order (finalized in 2021) required a comprehensive security program. Zoom later introduced a true E2EE meeting option, which disables some features, such as cloud recording, because the server cannot see the content.
Modern messaging E2EE uses the Signal Protocol (double ratchet with forward secrecy) or the IETF Messaging Layer Security (MLS) standard (RFC 9420, July 2023) for large groups.
Metadata Still Leaks
E2EE protects content, not necessarily metadata : account identifiers, contacts, timestamps, IP addresses, and group memberships. Metadata alone can reveal a relationship, a source talking to a journalist, or a patient contacting a clinic. Techniques such as Signal's "sealed sender," minimal server-side logging, and contact discovery that does not upload address books in plain form reduce metadata exposure.
Backups and Lawful Access
Messages are often backed up to cloud storage. Unless the backup is also end-to-end encrypted (for example, Apple's optional Advanced Data Protection for iCloud), the provider can read it. Government pressure on encryption continues: in February 2025 Apple withdrew Advanced Data Protection for new UK users rather than build access for authorities under the UK Investigatory Powers Act.
Video Calls and Conferencing
Recordings, transcripts, and AI summaries create new personal data. Tell participants, obtain consent where recording laws require it (several U.S. states require all parties' consent to record conversations), restrict access, and set retention.
Attention and engagement tracking features have been withdrawn after criticism (Zoom removed its "attention tracking" feature in 2020); avoid surveillance features that do not serve the meeting.
Meeting security: passcodes, waiting rooms, and authenticated-only meetings stop uninvited attendees ("Zoombombing").
Backgrounds and screen sharing reveal homes, documents, and notifications; offer blur and notification suppression.
Data residency and processors: meeting services process content, metadata, and telemetry; contracts and transfer mechanisms apply (Section 16.2).
Messaging and Collaboration
Workplace chat (Slack, Microsoft Teams) is usually transport-encrypted and retained for compliance, so employees should understand it is not private.
Off-channel messaging creates conflicts between privacy and record-keeping. U.S. financial regulators imposed more than $2 billion in fines from 2021 onward on firms whose staff used personal messaging apps for business, because the messages were not retained as required.
Disappearing messages reduce retention risk but must be weighed against legal holds and recordkeeping duties.
Mobile Devices
Mobile devices combine sensors, contacts, photos, location, and identifiers. Key privacy features and practices:
Runtime permissions for location, camera, microphone, contacts, and photos, requested in context and with the narrowest scope (approximate location, "while using," selected photos only).
Background access indicators (camera and microphone dots) and periodic reminders about background location.
Limited advertising identifiers (Apple's App Tracking Transparency, Android's resettable advertising ID).
Clipboard and screenshot protections (Section 10.1).
Work and personal separation through work profiles (Section 12.3).
Social Media
Visibility defaults: public-by-default posts and profiles expose more than users expect; protective defaults matter most for teenagers.
Contact discovery and importers: features that let people find friends by phone number can be abused at scale. A dataset of about 533 million Facebook users, built by abusing a contact-importer feature in 2019, was published in 2021, and Ireland's Data Protection Commission fined Meta EUR 265 million in 2022 over the data protection by design and by default failures.
Tagging and face suggestions: let people approve tags and opt out of face recognition.
Location in posts and photo metadata: strip EXIF data and make location sharing opt-in.
Data portability and downloads: give users their data, but protect the download flow against account takeover.
Gaming Platforms
Online games combine children's data, real-time voice and text chat with strangers, behavioral telemetry, in-game purchases, and sometimes kernel-level anti-cheat software. In 2022 Epic Games agreed to pay $520 million to resolve FTC allegations: $275 million as a COPPA civil penalty, in part because Fortnite's voice and text chat were on by default for children, exposing them to harassment, and $245 million in refunds over dark patterns in purchases. The order required voice and text chat to be off by default for children and teens.
Controls for gaming platforms:
Age assurance proportionate to risk and COPPA-compliant parental consent for users under 13. The FTC's amended COPPA Rule (effective June 23, 2025, with most compliance required by April 22, 2026) adds separate consent for disclosing children's data to third parties and requires a written data retention policy.
Chat off by default for minors, friend-only communication, and filters for personal information in chat.
Purchase safeguards: clear prices, confirmation steps, and parental controls (Section 9.2).
Telemetry minimization and transparency about anti-cheat data collection.