In the recent decades, privacy scholarship has made significant progress. Most of it was achieved in monodisciplinary works. However, privacy has a deeply interdisciplinary nature. Most importantly, societies as well as individuals experience privacy as being influenced by legal, technical, and social norms and structures. In this article, we hence attempt to connect insights of different academic disciplines into a joint model, an Interdisciplinary Privacy and Communication Model. The model differentiates four different elements: communication context, protection needs, threat and risk analysis, as well as protection enforcement. On the one hand, with this model, we aim to describe how privacy unfolds. On the other hand, the model also prescribes how privacy can be furnished and regulated. As such, the model contributes to a general understanding of privacy as a theoretical guide and offers a practical basis to address new challenges of the digital age.
Privacy scholars, advocates, and activists repeatedly emphasize the fact that current measures of privacy protection are insufficient to counter the systemic threats presented by datafication and platformization (van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell 2018: 24). These threats include discrimination against underprivileged groups, monopolization of power and knowledge, as well as manipulation. In this paper, we take that analysis one step further, suggesting that the consequences of inappropriate privacy protection online possibly even run counter to the normative principles that underpinned the standard clause for privacy protection in the first place. We discuss the ways in which attempts at protection run the risk of producing results that not only diverge from but, paradoxically, even distort the normative goals they intended to reach: informational self-determination, empowerment, and personal autonomy. Drawing on the framework of “normative paradoxes,” we argue that the ideals of a normatively increasingly one-sided, liberal individualism create complicities with the structural dynamics of platform capitalism, which in turn promote those material-discursive practices of digital usage that are ultimately extremely privacy-invasive.
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