Transparency & Privacy

The Transparency Agenda of the 2010/1 UK Coalition government promises to revolutionise government, public services and public engagement, by ‘holding politicians and public bodies to account, reducing the deficit and delivering better value for money in public spending, and realising significant economic benefits by enabling businesses and non-profit organisations to build innovative applications and websites using public data’, to quote the then Prime Minister. This is an ambitious programme with laudable aims, yet it naturally has limits.

The Politics of Privacy

In 'Privacy and Politics', Kieron O'Hara discusses the relation of the political philosophy of privacy to technical aspects in Web development. Despite a vigorous debate, the concept remains ambiguous, and a series of types of privacy is defined: epistemological, spatial, ideological, decisional and economic. Each of these has a different meaning in the online environment, and will be defended by different measures. The question of whether privacy is a right is raised, and generational differences in attitude discussed, alongside the issue of whether privacy should be protected in advance, via a consent model, or retrospectively via increased transparency and accountability. Finally, reasons both theoretical and practical for ranking privacy below other values (such as security, efficiency or benefits for the wider community) are discussed.

Privacy

Privacy is a concept that has been with us for hundreds of years, but it is relatively recently (the last 130 years or so) that it has been seen as something that needs protection as a legal right. Technology has presented many challenges to privacy, from the printing press to recording devices to communication hacking, but Social Media seems to present something new - a phenomenon of people giving up their personal information to an extent that would be considered extraordinary just a generation ago. In this lecture we look at attitudes and behaviors around privacy, see how social norms have shaped our expectations of privacy, and how we have come to trade our privacy for value, making complex (and sometimes ill-informed) risk decisions. We will also explore how people really behave on Social Media systems, to see whether we (as a society) should be concerned about modern attitudes to privacy, and whether there are any advantages that might balance that concern. Finally we look at how technology can be applied to the problems of privacy, both as a preventative measure, but also by aiding transparency and helping people to make better privacy decisions. These slides were updated for 2014.