Privacy\u27s Three Mile Island and the Need to Protect Political Privacy in Private-Law Contexts

When it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica obtained the personal and private information of eighty-seven million Facebook users to aid the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump, it was described as privacy\u27s Three Mile Island : an event, like the famed nuclear accident from which the term comes, that would shake and shape an industry and its approach to digital privacy and the underlying political information such privacy protects. In the intervening four years, despite these revelations, while some social media companies took voluntary measures to prevent a repeat of the types of abuses that plagued the 2016 election, little has changed in terms of the legal infrastructure that could protect the type of private information essential to the functioning of democracies. But what the Cambridge Analytica scandal also made clear is that threats to private information revealed and embedded in our digital activities threaten democracy. What is more, these threats risk undermining individual identity and autonomy and the ability of individuals to pursue individual and collective self-determination. An individual\u27s political identity-with whom she associates, what she says, what she thinks, the questions and ideas she explores, for whom she votes-is all caught up in notions of political privacy. While current public-law protections are fairly robust when it comes to protecting political privacy, even as some fear that current responses to the pandemic may require a degree of intrusion upon privacy by government, the threats to privacy that have emerged in the digital age preceded the current public health crisis and emanate mostly from private actors, where protections for political privacy are quite weak. Nevertheless, democracy requires a high degree of protection for individual identity and political privacy, regardless of the source of the threat, especially when the lines between private action and public effects are blurred, as in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Given the importance of the integrity of identity to democracy and the fact that many of the threats to political privacy emanate from private actors, as this Article shows, enhanced protections for this political privacy are also necessary in the private-law context. Calls for greater protection of digital privacy often result in recommendations that a single institution-the market, political bodies, or the courts-should take a greater role in policing online privacy. Yet these institutions are often interdependent when it comes to protecting digital privacy, and, by extension, political privacy. Efforts promoted through one institution can often have positive-and negative-spillover effects on the functioning of other institutions: they can at times strengthen the protections of such privacy in other institutional settings or undermine the ability of those other institutions to function effectively to protect political privacy. So which institution or set of institutions is best suited to protect such political privacy? This question calls for the application of the method known as comparative institutional analysis, which assesses the relative strengths and weaknesses of different institutions in achieving desired policy goals. At the same time, as this discussion will reveal, even comparative institutional analysis, if it does not take into account the extent to which different institutional settings can have spillover effects on the ability of other institutions to achieve particular policy goals, fails to offer sufficient tools for the assessment of the best institution or institutions to achieve such goals. Indeed, as this Article attempts to show, at least when it comes to protecting political privacy in private-law contexts, any effective institutional response to the threats to political privacy will likely require not just an appreciation for the ways in which different institutional settings are interdependent when it comes to achieving that goal but also that any such effort will require an integrated and comprehensive approach that spans different institutional settings. In the end, this Article is an attempt to use the tools of comparative institutional analysis to assess the relative abilities of different institutions to protect political privacy, including an assessment of the litigation that has arisen in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, to determine the role of different institutions in protecting political privacy in private-law--as opposed to public-law-settings. Through a review of this and other litigation to protect digital privacy, which, more and more, affects political privacy, I will show not just how different institutional settings can strengthen the functioning of other settings but also how they can undermine such settings. Thus, given the fact that institutions that protect political privacy can often work at cross-purposes in policing political privacy, this Article argues for the need for comprehensive, integrated, and cooperative action across institutions to ensure the proper protection of this type of privacy

Understanding privacy leakage concerns in Facebook: A longitudinal case study

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis focuses on examining users’ perceptions of privacy leakage in Facebook – the world’s largest and most popular social network site (SNS). The global popularity of this SNS offers a hugely tempting resource for organisations engaged in online business. The personal data willingly shared between online friends’ networks intuitively appears to be a natural extension of current advertising strategies such as word-of-mouth and viral marketing. Therefore organisations are increasingly adopting innovative ways to exploit the detail-rich personal data of SNS users for business marketing. However, commercial use of such personal information has provoked outrage amongst Facebook users and has radically highlighted the issue of privacy leakage. To date, little is known about how SNS users perceive such leakage of privacy. So a greater understanding of the form and nature of SNS users’ concerns about privacy leakage would contribute to the current literature as well as help to formulate best practice guidelines for organisations. Given the fluid, context-dependent and temporal nature of privacy, a longitudinal case study representing the launch of Facebook’s social Ads programme was conducted to investigate the phenomenon of privacy leakage within its real-life setting. A qualitative user blogs commentary was collected between November 2007 and December 2010 during the two-stage launch of the social Ads programme. Grounded theory data analysis procedures were used to analyse users’ blog postings. The resulting taxonomy shows that business integrity, user control, transparency, data protection breaches, automatic information broadcast and information leak are the core privacy leakage concerns of Facebook users. Privacy leakage concerns suggest three limits, or levels: organisational, user and legal, which provide the basis to understanding the nature and scope of the exploitation of SNS users’ data for commercial purposes. The case study reported herein is novel, as existing empirical research has not identified and analysed privacy leakage concerns of Facebook users

TB STIGMA – MEASUREMENT GUIDANCE

TB is the most deadly infectious disease in the world, and stigma continues to play a significant role in worsening the epidemic. Stigma and discrimination not only stop people from seeking care but also make it more difficult for those on treatment to continue, both of which make the disease more difficult to treat in the long-term and mean those infected are more likely to transmit the disease to those around them. TB Stigma – Measurement Guidance is a manual to help generate enough information about stigma issues to design and monitor and evaluate efforts to reduce TB stigma. It can help in planning TB stigma baseline measurements and monitoring trends to capture the outcomes of TB stigma reduction efforts. This manual is designed for health workers, professional or management staff, people who advocate for those with TB, and all who need to understand and respond to TB stigma

Marketplace of Ideas, Privacy, and the Digital Audience

The availability of almost limitless sets of digital information has opened a vast marketplace of ideas. Information service providers like Facebook and Twitter provide users with an array of personal information about products, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. While this data enriches the lives of those who share content on the internet, it comes at the expense of privacy. Social media companies disseminate news, advertisements, and political messages, while also capitalizing on consumers’ private shopping, surfing, and traveling habits. Companies like Cambridge Analytica, Amazon, and Apple rely on algorithmic programs to mash up and scrape enormous amounts of online and otherwise available personal data to microtarget audiences. By collecting and then processing psychometric data sets, commercial and political advertisers rely on emotive advertisements to manipulate biases and vulnerabilities that impact audiences’ shopping and voting habits. The Free Speech Clause is not an absolute bar to the regulation of commercial intermediaries who exploit private information obtained on the digital marketplace of ideas. The Commerce Clause authorizes passage of laws to regulate internet companies that monetize intimate data and resell it to third parties. Rather than applying strict scrutiny to such proposed regulations as one would to pure speech, judges should rely on intermediate scrutiny to test statutes limiting the commercial marketing of data. Legislative reforms are needed to address the substantial economic effects of massive, commercial agglomeration of data files containing histories, daily routines, medical conditions, personal habits, and the like. To address this logarithmically expanding cyberphenomenon, Congress should temporally restrict the retention and trade in private data. Internet intermediaries should not be immune from such a restriction on private data storage. For such a policy to be effective, safe harbor provisions shielding internet intermediaries should be modified to allow for civil litigation against internet companies that refuse a data subject’s request to remove personal information no longer needed to accomplish the transaction for which it was originally processed

Modern Socio-Technical Perspectives on Privacy

This open access book provides researchers and professionals with a foundational understanding of online privacy as well as insight into the socio-technical privacy issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems, covering several modern topics (e.g., privacy in social media, IoT) and underexplored areas (e.g., privacy accessibility, privacy for vulnerable populations, cross-cultural privacy). The book is structured in four parts, which follow after an introduction to privacy on both a technical and social level: Privacy Theory and Methods covers a range of theoretical lenses through which one can view the concept of privacy. The chapters in this part relate to modern privacy phenomena, thus emphasizing its relevance to our digital, networked lives. Next, Domains covers a number of areas in which privacy concerns and implications are particularly salient, including among others social media, healthcare, smart cities, wearable IT, and trackers. The Audiences section then highlights audiences that have traditionally been ignored when creating privacy-preserving experiences: people from other (non-Western) cultures, people with accessibility needs, adolescents, and people who are underrepresented in terms of their race, class, gender or sexual identity, religion or some combination. Finally, the chapters in Moving Forward outline approaches to privacy that move beyond one-size-fits-all solutions, explore ethical considerations, and describe the regulatory landscape that governs privacy through laws and policies. Perhaps even more so than the other chapters in this book, these chapters are forward-looking by using current personalized, ethical and legal approaches as a starting point for re-conceptualizations of privacy to serve the modern technological landscape. The book’s primary goal is to inform IT students, researchers, and professionals about both the fundamentals of online privacy and the issues that are most pertinent to modern information systems. Lecturers or teacherscan assign (parts of) the book for a “professional issues” course. IT professionals may select chapters covering domains and audiences relevant to their field of work, as well as the Moving Forward chapters that cover ethical and legal aspects. Academicswho are interested in studying privacy or privacy-related topics will find a broad introduction in both technical and social aspects

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

A mOOC prepared to make a difference

mOOC’s arguably form one of the most discussed topics in education today providing the means possible to disperse education to a widening audience, allowing Universities a new mean of recruitment and delivery. The University of Canterbury e-Learning Lab and OERu discuss their recent collaborative experience

Beyond the struggles : using social-developmental lenses on the transition to clinical training

Transitions are inevitable. Transition discourse often focuses on the stress associated with entering a new phase of training. Medical educators and researchers have sought to eliminate transition stress with limited success. Recent transition literature has called for new perspectives on the transition ‘problem’ to optimise students’ adaptation to change. This thesis aimed to enhance our understanding of how undergraduate medical students navigate the transition from pre-clinical to clinical training using sociocultural lenses. We first conducted a scoping review (Chapter Two) exploring how researchers have approached the transition from pre-clinical to clinical training and identified the gaps in these approaches. Following the scoping review, we created two overarching questions that address to our research agenda. 1) In what ways does the transition from pre-clinical to clinical training contribute to medical students’ professional and personal identity development? 2) What role do social relationships play in students’ transition from pre-clinical to clinical training? Chapters Three through Five represent individual empirical studies and publications each conducted within the five-year Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) undergraduate medical programme at Western Sydney University in Australia between 2018 and 2020. We conclude that the transition to clinical training is an opportunity for student identity and lifelong skill development (e.g. proactive behaviour); our explicit consideration of identity formation shows this. It occurs when students went from being pre-clinical students to becoming clinical students working and learning around patients. We also conclude that the transition to clinical training is an opportunity for students’ social network development and utilisation. We found that students’ networks are diverse— including family, peers, near-peers, doctors, academic staff, nurses; dynamic—they change significantly over time; and deliberate—students made choices about who was in their social support networks. We lastly conclude that the transition to clinical training is both a threat and an opportunity for learning and development; a developmental networking asset. Students’ lived reality of this tension between opportunity and threat will depend on educators shifting their transition-related perspectives, and creating supportive environments for the transitioning student

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

This is the complete text of Daniel J. Solove\u27s book, THE FUTURE OF REPUTATION: GOSSIP, RUMOR, AND PRIVACY ON THE INTERNET (Full Text) (Yale University Press, October 2007).Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But there\u27s a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private lives - often of dubious reliability and sometimes totally false - will follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with stories of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.Solove explores how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cyber mobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Longstanding notions of privacy need review: unless we establish a balance among privacy, free speech, and anonymity, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free