Linking loose ends: An interdisciplinary privacy and communication model

Abstract

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 Is Dead, Long Live Privacy!

“…It is a community perspective on privacy, shifting away the locus of control from the individual to the group, and to explicit and implicit norms. Bräunlich et al (2020) similarly approach privacy “as a social practice situated in a digital age” (p. 4), observing that “ [w]ith the increasing digitalization the social and political dimensions of privacy have come to the fore , which is why new protection needs emerge that extend existing ones […]” (p. 11).…”

The Chilling Effects of Digital Dataveillance: A Theoretical Model and an Empirical Research Agenda

“…The sense of dataveillance will primarily affect the person's attitude toward digital communication (see Bräunlich et al, 2021)—basically, the individual's evaluation of whether digital communication, and thus leaving digital traces, is “a good idea”—this evaluation need not be extensively processed cognitively. More technically: “attitude toward the behavior is assumed to be a function of readily accessible beliefs regarding the behavior's likely consequences” (Ajzen, 2020: 2).…”

Comparative Privacy Research: Literature Review, Framework, and Research Agenda

“…Policymakers, too, have signaled privacy's importance and complexity through attempts at regulation, with efforts that include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and others. Yet, privacy research (and thus regulation and development of privacy-relevant technology) continues to evolve within epistemological silos (Bräunlich et al 2020), while privacy theories and conceptualizations continue to be developed and validated through work conducted mostly within WEIRD contexts and among their affluent populations (Wu, Vitak and Zimmer 2020). Privacy research has been criticized as sustaining inherent systemic vulnerabilities by enacting an ethnocentric approach (Arora 2019) and for reifying power structures that are rooted in deterministic, technocentric, capitalistic worldviews that preserve existing forms of marginalization and enable new ones, consisting of the 'privacy rich' and 'privacy poor' (Marwick and boyd 2018).…”