Conceptualizing privacy : towards engineering privacy in contemporary society
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2015
Open Access
Copyright Clearance Process
- Recently Added
- In Progress
- Open Access
This item is open access.
Privacy breaches are continually reported in the mainstream media. This phenomenon has shown that privacy is a significant concern in our everyday lives. It turns out, however, that there is a lack of technological support for privacy and personal information management in practice. Although there are many so-called privacy-enhancing technologies available, the occurrence of regular breaches of privacy demonstrate that a fundamental problem remains. A key reason for the lack of comprehensive solutions to privacy management is that there is no consensus of the meaning of “privacy” in the literature and contemporary society.
There are three key aspects to the development of a better understanding of privacy. First, privacy has a subjective nature: it is person-dependent and highly contextual - privacy requirements can vary significantly, both culturally and spatiotemporally. Hence, it is difficult to specify privacy ontologically. Second, privacy is complicated by contemporary information technologies and social media, and as a result its informational aspect dominates the privacy status of the individual. Third, privacy concerns personal information. In today's digital age, the kind of information that can be considered as personal is often vague or shared, e.g. DNA, medical health records, marriage, or friendship. The context and information at stake can make it difficult to determine one's right to privacy.
These problems promote privacy as an ontological challenge with significant practical implications. To tackle this challenge, this dissertation takes an ontological approach to develop a new understanding of privacy within a framework of selfhood, and a conceptual model for learning the privacy implications of information. In recognition of privacy's conceptual complexity yet practical nature, this dissertation argues the need for a new theory of privacy management. Based on the ontological understanding and the conceptual model developed herein, the foundations of a privacy theory are constructed in two dimensions using a high-level descriptive language for different levels of privacy stakeholders to communicate privacy concerns and specify privacy requirements, as well as a privacy system for managing privacy goals designed to achieve the desired level of privacy.
This dissertation is conceptual in nature. It seeks to advance privacy management in contemporary society. The theory and conceptual development will be able to be used by business analysts, system designers and developers, and other theorists to create better privacy management frameworks, systems and technologies. The theoretical work will help to guide the adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies and thereby reduce privacy breaches. As a demonstration, two applications are presented. Using an Information Systems lens and mechanisms that could be used to implement the research findings, the theory and conceptual development are applied to two important areas that have significant privacy implications in society, namely, social network recommendation and Privacy-by-Design for information systems.
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: