Session Chair: Emily van der Nagel
Presentation 1
A Cultural Clash? Privacy Framing in Legislative Hearings After Cambridge Analytica
Dmitry Epstein(1), Rotem Medzini(2)
1: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; 2: University of Birmingham, UK
The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 sparked a global regulatory debate over privacy, exposing gaps in conceptualizations of privacy between users, industry, and policymakers. This study leverages the ensuing parliamentary hearings in the US and the EU in order to examine the heterogeneity of privacy frames among elite actors. Using a validated coding scheme, we systematically analyze 593 interventions by lawmakers and witnesses, capturing privacy-specific attributes such as its vertical and horizontal orientations, proximity of privacy relations, and responsibility for privacy infringement and protection. Our preliminary findings reveal an overall dominance of vertical privacy framing in the hearings, which stands in contrast with earlier findings about horizontal framing among users. We also observe differences in privacy framing between the industry and the lawmakers, and between conservative and liberal parliamentarians. Our study contributes to the literature on privacy conceptualization and framing, highlighting the dimensionalization, the gaps, and the politics of privacy in policy deliberations. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study and activism surrounding privacy as a pivotal democratic issue in surveillance capitalism.
Presentation 2
A Game of Privacy Tug of War: A Historical Analysis of Privacy Settings
Chelsea Leigh Horne
American University, United States of America
This paper examines the role and power of social media platforms in developing and applying privacy controls, and by extension, privacy norms for their users. This paper presents an empirical study through content analysis of Meta’s news articles on internet privacy and data security. The purpose is primarily twofold: 1. To gather data on what changes Meta has made to privacy settings, and when these changes took place, and 2. To analyze how Meta frames privacy through these changes. This study offers insight into how Meta engages with privacy through changes to privacy settings over the years as well as an analysis into the frames deployed to explain these updates. Much of the literature has focused on whether users change settings, the efficacy of settings, and the deceptive qualities of settings (boyd & Hargittai, 2010; Mathur et al., 2021; Shah & Sandvig, 2008; Svirsky, 2019). This paper builds on this literature and suggests that privacy settings, beyond their technical purpose of providing user customization, are a critical lever of power. Meta’s continued and historical reliance on privacy settings changes in moments of crisis underscores the critical role of privacy settings. As scholars have demonstrated, the privatization of internet governance through privacy policies, infrastructure, architecture, and content moderation policies (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015), this chapter suggests that privacy settings should also receive critical attention from scholars, policymakers, and users.
Presentation 3
Temporal Dynamics of Chilling Effects of Dataveillance: Empirical Findings from a Longitudinal Field Experiment
Céline Odermatt, Kiran Kappeler, Noemi Festic, Michael Latzer
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Digital traces generated by internet users are automatically collected, stored, and analyzed by public and private actors. This dataveillance becomes salient to users through repeated exposure over time to triggers of a sense of dataveillance. This can lead to a range of consequences including democratically concerning responses such as the self-inhibition of legitimate digital communication behavior, known as the chilling effects of dataveillance. Such chilling effects are expected to subtly accumulate over time. Hence, longitudinal in-situ studies are required to capture the temporal dynamics of individuals’ perception of dataveillance and the resulting behavioral changes. Relying on a longitudinal online field experiment with a representative sample of Swiss internet users, this study investigates how chilling effects accumulate over time and aims to capture the temporal dynamics of chilling effects. Preliminary results reveal that the experimental treatment successfully heightened participants' sense of dataveillance over time. Time significantly predicted this increase, aligning with the notion of accumulating chilling effects. Furthermore, the comfort levels of the digital communication behaviors, including information searching, opinion voicing, and information disclosing, were over time lower for the experimental treatment than control condition, supporting the chilling-effects hypothesis. Accumulating chilling effects were found for information disclosing as the experimental treatment and time predicted a decrease in participants’ comfortability level. This article provides an innovative contribution to the growing research on the chilling effects of dataveillance and adds to the empirical understanding of the nature of chilling effects.
Presentation 4
Hackers’ privacy approaches: How privacy violation and privacy protection go hand in hand
Keren Levy-Eshkol, Rivka Ribak
University of Haifa, Israel
This study examines the apparent paradox of hackers engaging in both invading and safeguarding privacy. Drawing on digital materialism, which posits that code holds a material presence and cultural significance beyond its functional role, the research aims to illuminate the hackers' ethical dilemmas embedded in privacy code. To gain insight into the cultural logic behind this seeming contrast, we conducted qualitative content and code analyses on both malicious and non-malicious code projects from the open-source platform GitHub. We have narrowed down a list of 2500 hackers to 52 who own both malicious and non-malicious projects, with a reference to privacy. We found that these hackers justify their malicious projects as educational tools, often cautioning other users against illegal use. The hackers' logic asserts that those possessing private information are responsible for its protection, be it the end-user or the software owner managing the information post-collection. This logic is translated into code using two privacy approaches: a formal privacy-by-policy and a technically-oriented privacy-by-design. The hackers' polar approach to privacy materializes both in violating privacy when crafting breaching code and in writing code that expertly protects it. From this individualized, privatized standpoint, this duality makes perfect sense.
