Lifelong privacy – privacy and identity management for life.

Abstract. The design of identity management preserving an individual's privacy must not stop at supporting the user in managing her/his present identities. Instead, since any kind of privacy intrusion may have implications on the individual's future life, it is necessary that we identify and understand the issues related to longterm aspects of privacyenhancing identity management. Only that way, according solutions can be developed, which enable users to control the disclosure of their personal data throughout their whole lives, comprising past, present, and future. This paper will give a general overview about concepts supporting privacyenhancing identity management. Further, it introduces the reader to the problem field of privacy management by means of privacy-enhancing identity management during various stages of life as well as in various areas of life. Statements about required mechanisms will be given as well as directions regarding the three most important aspects to consider when managing one's identities: communication infrastructure as well as selection of communication partners and tools

Facebook: Shifting Privacy, Identity, and Power Online

Due to staggering technological shifts in recent decades, the Internet has become a routine fixture in everyday life. The popularity of social networking sites, in particular, raises myriad questions regarding identity construction and social interaction. It is also unclear how these practices are related to perceptions of privacy. This dissertation examines how traditional notions of privacy compare, and apply, to privacy on the Internet and considers how issues of power are (re)created in online spaces. By focusing on identity enactment strategies and social connectivity practices, this work sheds light on the ways in which individuals define privacy and choose to engage online. This analysis also investigates how current public discourses, which emphasize users\u27 ignorance to privacy threats online and the detrimental effects of social media on interpersonal interaction, map onto user experiences. The findings stem from an online focus group with twenty Facebook users coupled with five individual interviews with researchers, legal experts, and artists whose work centers on social media. This project constructs a psychology of privacy that helps fill in existing gaps in the research on what is now happening on the social networking site, Facebook. The findings challenge familiar tendencies to pursue research agendas premised on binary frameworks, such as isolation versus connection and authentic versus inauthentic identities. Instead, the data highlight the novel forms of connectivity and identity practices that transpire online. As such, the data add to existing research that accentuates how online practices serve to enhance social connections and allow for a multiplicity of identity. Further, undermining some of the assumptions woven throughout public discourses concerning privacy invasions online, this dissertation demonstrates that users adopt innovative strategies for maintaining personal levels of comfort with respect to privacy online and reveals that perceptions of privacy are largely rooted in the ability to trust fellow users with personal information. Individual actions of marking boundaries with respect to what, and with whom, users share online provide the material with which researchers can construct new, dynamic definitions of personal privacy in virtual contexts

Privacy Torts: Unreliable Remedies for LGBT Plaintiffs

In the United States, both constitutional law and tort law recognize the right to privacy, understood as legal entitlement to an intimate life of one’s own free from undue interference by others and the state. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (“LGBT”) persons have defended their interests in dignity, equality, autonomy, and intimate relationships in the courts by appealing to that right. In the constitutional arena, LGBT Americans have claimed the protection of state and federal privacy rights with a modicum of well-known success. Holding that homosexuals have the same right to sexual privacy as heterosexuals, Lawrence v. Texas symbolizes the possibility of victory in the courts for LGBT Americans seeking privacy in intimate life. In the U.S. tort arena, LGBT plaintiffs have claimed violations of their privacy rights and have sometimes won. As detailed throughout this Article, LGBT plaintiffs have accused such defendants of prying, spying, insulting or harassing them, or disclosing their birth sex, sexual orientation, or medical information without authorization. Lawsuits have framed the violations experienced by LGBT claimants as one or more of the four privacy torts Dean William L. Prosser distinguished and enshrined in the Second Restatement of Torts. LGBT plaintiffs relying on Prosser’s common law tort remedies have not been as successful as some would have predicted based on a general understanding of the torts and their superficial appeal. The common law of torts has yet to generate its Goodridge or Lawrence. In this Article I analyze cases in which LGBT plaintiffs have alleged one or more of Prosser’s four common law privacy tort offenses on facts that expressly involve their sexual orientations or gender identities. I argue that plaintiffs’ lawyers in LGBT issues-related cases implicitly challenge the integrity of Prosser’s formal taxonomy. LGBT issues-related cases may not strain Prosser’s taxonomy any more than other privacy tort cases, but this body of cases exposes the limitations of Prosser’s distinctions on particularly poignant and compelling facts. I argue further that the theoretically promising invasion of privacy torts have not been especially useful to LGBT plaintiffs seeking relief in cases related to their sexual orientations or identities. For example, the invasion of privacy tort has not reliably vindicated the complex interest LGBT plaintiffs understandably assert in what I term “selective disclosure” of their sexual orientations or identities. I suggest that recent success in the LGBT population’s historic quest for equality and inclusion potentially undercuts the already tenuous practical utility of the invasion of privacy tort. Courts may fail to discern that sexual orientation and sexual identity-related privacy protection is warranted for LGBT individuals if, they believe there has been a significant reduction in violence, social stigma, and discrimination associated with open LGBT status

Sexuality and Sovereignty: The Global Limits and Possibilities of Lawrence Symposium: Legal Rights in Historical Perspective: From the Margins to the Mainstream

In the summer of 2003, the Supreme Court handed gay and lesbian activists a stunning victory in the decision of Lawrence v. Texas, which summarily overruled Bowers v. Hardwick. At issue was whether Texas\u27 prohibition of same-sex sexual conduct violated the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In a powerful, poetic, and strident opinion, Justice Kennedy, writing for a six-member majority, reversed Bowers, observing that individual decisions regarding physical intimacy between consenting adults, either of the same or opposite sex, are constitutionally protected, and thus fall outside of the reach of state intervention. Volumes can be written about the decision; it represents a culmination of nearly a century\u27s worth of work in dismantling prejudicial views on gays and lesbians in American law and, indeed, the rest of the world. In this article, I explore Lawrence\u27s hidden and unstated implications for the recent globalization of gay civil rights, and contemplate whether Lawrence is yet another symbol of a global wave of change, or whether it represents an ultimately unfulfillable goal worldwide, particularly in places where gay civil rights movements have been met with considerable backlash. I will argue in this paper that a close reading of Lawrence represents a culmination of a historic, and increasingly global, convergence between liberty, privacy, and anti-essentialist theories of sexual identity. Indeed, the ultimate significance of Lawrence lies not in its overt shielding of sexual minorities from criminalization, but rather in its willingness to offer to the American (indeed global) public, a version of sexual autonomy that is filled with both promise and danger, fragility and universality. For, quite unlike Bowers, which largely directed its judicial gaze towards gays and lesbians in particular, the court in Lawrence carried a message of sexual self-determination for everyone, irrespective of sexual orientation. Emerging from this decision is a vision of sexual self-determination, what I call sexual sovereignty, that represents the intersectional convergence of three separate prisms: spatial privacy, expressive liberty, and deliberative autonomy. At the same time, by examining the case law that has flourished in its wake, we see that it has often been correlated with an implicit logic of containment that has relegated the exercise of sexual autonomy to private, rather than public, spaces. In creating a space for the convergence of all three facets, I would argue that Lawrence is a triumph - and a product - of anti-essentialism, but its implicit logic of containment limits its potential to traverse both theoretical and global divisions regarding culture and sexuality. Consequently, ultimately, despite the power of its universalist vision, this Article argues that Lawrence is circumscribed by potential limitations wrought by culture, property, nationality, and citizenship

The Ethical Implications of Personal Health Monitoring

Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) uses electronic devices which monitor and record health-related data outside a hospital, usually within the home. This paper examines the ethical issues raised by PHM. Eight themes describing the ethical implications of PHM are identified through a review of 68 academic articles concerning PHM. The identified themes include privacy, autonomy, obtrusiveness and visibility, stigma and identity, medicalisation, social isolation, delivery of care, and safety and technological need. The issues around each of these are discussed. The system / lifeworld perspective of Habermas is applied to develop an understanding of the role of PHMs as mediators of communication between the institutional and the domestic environment. Furthermore, links are established between the ethical issues to demonstrate that the ethics of PHM involves a complex network of ethical interactions. The paper extends the discussion of the critical effect PHMs have on the patient’s identity and concludes that a holistic understanding of the ethical issues surrounding PHMs will help both researchers and practitioners in developing effective PHM implementations