Anonymity Versus Privacy in a Control Society

Society is becoming increasingly more securitized with surveillance technologies having entered a phase of ubiquity, with their components built into many of our daily digital devices. The default state of tracking, monitoring, and recording has fundamentally changed our social and communicative environments. Through the lens of surveillance, everything we do and say can be potentially categorized as a “threat.” Our technological devices become the means by which social control becomes informationalized. A common tool of resistance against these pervasive surveillance practices takes the form of arguing for greater privacy protections to be implemented through information privacy and data protection laws. However, beyond the complexity of the privacy discourse itself, there are diverse information environments not easily parsed by law where the tension between transparency and secrecy complicates privacy practices. The main purpose of this article is conceptual. I consider what the practice of anonymity can offer that privacy does not. From a legal perspective, highlighting the nuances between privacy and anonymity helps us to understand the extent to which our speech and behaviors are becoming increasingly more constrained in the digital environment. In cultural and social contexts, privacy and anonymity often connote differing values; privacy is commonly considered a moral virtue, while anonymity is often maligned and associated with criminal or deviant behavior. In contrast to this understanding, I argue that anonymity should be reconsidered in light of the deterioration of privacy considerations as privacy practices are reframed as contractual resources that are co-opted by both the market and the state. Anonymity, more broadly construed as a mode of resistance to surveillance practices, allows for a more flexible, consistent, and collective means of ensuring civil liberties remain intact

Privacy Dependencies

This Article offers a comprehensive survey of privacy dependencies—the many ways that our privacy depends on the decisions and disclosures of other people. What we do and what we say can reveal as much about others as it does about ourselves, even when we don’t realize it or when we think we’re sharing information about ourselves alone. We identify three bases upon which our privacy can depend: our social ties, our similarities to others, and our differences from others. In a tie-based dependency, an observer learns about one person by virtue of her social relationships with others—family, friends, or other associates. In a similarity-based dependency, inferences about our unrevealed attributes are drawn from our similarities to others for whom that attribute is known. And in difference- based dependencies, revelations about ourselves demonstrate how we are different from others—by showing, for example, how we “break the mold” of normal behavior or establishing how we rank relative to others with respect to some desirable attribute. We elaborate how these dependencies operate, isolating the relevant mechanisms and providing concrete examples of each mechanism in practice, the values they implicate, and the legal and technical interventions that may be brought to bear on them. Our work adds to a growing chorus demonstrating that privacy is neither an individual choice nor an individual value— but it is the first to systematically demonstrate how different types of dependencies can raise very different normative concerns, implicate different areas of law, and create different challenges for regulation

Privacy as a Cultural Phenomenon

Privacy remains both contentious and ever more pertinent in contemporary society. Yet it persists as an ill-defined term, not only within specific fields but in its various uses and implications between and across technical, legal and political contexts. This article offers a new critical review of the history of privacy in terms of two dominant strands of thinking: freedom and property. These two conceptions of privacy can be seen as successive historical epochs brought together under digital technologies, yielding increasingly complex socio-technical dilemmas. By simplifying the taxonomy to its socio-cultural function, the article provides a generalisable, interdisciplinary approach to privacy. Drawing on new technologies, historical trends, sociological studies and political philosophy, the article presents a discussion of the value of privacy as a term, before proposing a defense of the term cyber security as a mode of scalable cognitive privacy that integrates the relative needs of individuals, governments and corporations

Information Freedoms and the Case for Anonymous Community

What we have witnessed in the last decade in the context of social upheaval, social activism, and resulting social movements is testament to the need for a re-evaluation of what constitutes community in a networked world, and what role the individual subject plays within social networks, systems of social, corporate, and state control, and networks of resistance. New processes of subjectivation are emerging and rather than being grounded in identity, sociality is being reconfigured, and it is in this process that this dissertation focusses on anonymity as a means of working through these new configurations. This integrated article dissertation explores the concept of anonymity and emerging practices of community in three chapters. The first examines anonymity in the context of civil liberties through a critique of privacy. By analyzing legal, social, and cultural understandings of privacy, this chapter problemmatizes the privacy defence against excessive tracking and monitoring of speech and behaviour, and suggests ways of incorporating anonymous practices in order to discover more robust methods of collectively empowering ourselves in the digital environment. The second chapter explores anonymity as a political process that can be illustrated in the cases of Wikileaks, Anonymous, and Occupy, presenting the various ways in which anonymity is mobilized in information activism as a resource for political action. We can see a common thread running through the variety of methods of dissent employed by the above mentioned groups. This commonality centres on the way anonymity figures (sometimes subtly, other times prominently) in identity formation, subjectivity, trust, revolt, authority, connection and communication. This thesis is an exploration of the role of anonymity at the intersection of these functions of community. The third chapter traces contemporary theoretical explorations of radical community through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, and Giorgio Agamben, and identifies characteristics of anonymity in strategies of being-in-common

The Moral Landscape of Monetary Design

In this article, we identify three key design dimensions along which cryptocurrencies differ -- privacy, censorship-resistance, and consensus procedure. Each raises important normative issues. Our discussion uncovers new ways to approach the question of whether Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies should be used as money, and new avenues for developing a positive answer to that question. A guiding theme is that progress here requires a mixed approach that integrates philosophical tools with the purely technical results of disciplines like computer science and economics. Note: this article is the second entry within a two-part sequence on the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of Cryptocurrency

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Editorial

It is tradition that the Electronic Journal of Information Systems Evaluation (EJISE) publish a special issue containing the full versions of the best papers that were presented in a preliminary version during the 8th European Conference on Information Management and Evaluation (ECIME 2014). The faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the Ghent University was host for this successful conference on 11-12th of September 2014. ECIME 2014 received a submission of 86 abstracts and after the double-blind peer review process, thirty one academic research papers, nine PhD research papers, one master research paper and four work-in-progress papers were accepted and selected for presentation. ECIME 2014 hosted academics from twenty-two nationalities, amongst them: Australia, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Finland, France, Greece, Ireland, Lebanon, Lithuania, Macedonia (FYROM), Norway, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands, Turkey and the UK. From the thirty-one academic papers presented during the conference nine papers were selected for inclusion in this special issue of EJISE. The selected papers represent empirical work as well as theoretical research on the broad topic of management and evaluation of information systems. The papers show a wide variety of perspectives to deal with the problem

Business process modelling in ERP implementation literature review

Business processes are the backbone of any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. Business process modelling (BPM) has become essential for modern, process driven enterprises due to the vibrant business environments. As a consequence enterprises are dealing with a substantial rate of organizational and business processes change. Business process modelling enables a common understanding and analysis of the business processes, which is the first step in every ERP implementation methodology (blueprint phase). In order to represent enterprise processes models in an accurate manner, it is paramount to choose a right business process modeling technique and tool. The problem of many ERP projects rated as unsuccessful is directly connected to a lack of use of business process models and notations during the blueprint phase. Also, blueprint implementation phase is crucial in order to fit planned processes in an organization with processes implemented in the solution. However, business analysts and ERP implementation professionals have substantial difficulties to navigate through a large number of theoretical models and representational notations that have been proposed for business process modeling (BPM). As the availability of different business process modeling references is huge, it is time consuming to make review and classification of all modeling techniques. Therefor, in reality majority of ERP implementations blueprint documents have no business process modeling included in generating blueprint documents. Choosing the right model comprise the purpose of the analysis and acquaintance of the available process modelling techniques and tools. The number of references on business modelling is quit large, so it is very hard to make a decision which modeling notation or technique to use. The main purpose of this paper is to make a review of business process modelling literature and describe the key process modelling techniques. The focus will be on all business process modeling that could be used in ERP implementations, specifically during the blueprint phase of the implementation process. Detailed review of BPM (Business process modeling) theoretical models and representational notations, should assist decision makers and ERP integrators in comparatively evaluating and selecting suitable modeling approaches