Is there privacy in privacy regulation? Closing the gap between the experience of privacy and the regulation of online privacy

  • Workshop
  • Board Room
  • Thursday 21.05 — 14:15 - 15:30

Organising Institution

Privacy Studies Journal

International

Privacy Studies Journal (PSJ) is a fully open access, multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal published by the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen. It has an international editorial board with members representing a broad range of academic fields. PSJ spans the present and the past, and envisions the future. Featuring original, high-quality research on privacy in its broadest sense and with the human component in focus, we welcome contributions that take privacy and the private as catalysts for analysis.
Offline privacy depends on spatial and social cues (looking away, closing a door, etc)—with privacy as the power to exclude others. Online privacy lacks this dimension and is solely structured on personal information, rooted in Warren and Brandeis’s legal articulation of a “right to be let alone”. To ground the discussion, we will engage experimentally with common offline privacy practices. We will contrast embodied, situational experiences with online privacy mechanisms, such as cookie consent. Together, we will map the limits of “experiencing” privacy in digital environments, where there is often no tangible other, no shared space, and no immediate social situation. Warren and Brandeis’s wrote in response to the rise of mass media. These differed significantly from the internet. In this workshop, we examine the gap between the experience of privacy and the regulation of online privacy; participants will achieve a nuanced understanding of how to address this gap.