Improving privacy choice through design: How designing for reflection could support privacy self-management

In today’s society online privacy is primarily regulated by two main regulatory systems: (command-and-control) law and notice and consent (i.e., agreeing to terms of agreement and privacy policies). Both systems prohibit reflection on privacy issues from the public at large and restrict the privacy debate to the legal and regulatory domains. However, from a socio-ethical standpoint, the general public needs to be included in the privacy debate in order to make well-informed decisions and contribute to the law-making process. Therefore, we argue that privacy regulation must shift from a purely legal debate and simple one-time yes/no decisions by ‘data subjects’ to public (debate and) awareness and continuous reflection on privacy and privacy decisions by users of IT systems and services. In order to allow for this reflective thinking, individuals need to (1) understand what is at stake when interacting with digital technology; (2) have the ability to reflect on the consequences of their privacy decisions; and (3) have meaningful controls to express their privacy preferences. Together, these three factors could provide for knowledge, evaluation and choice within the context of online privacy. In this paper, we elaborate on these factors and provide a design-for-privacy model that introduces friction as a central design concept that stimulates reflective thinking and thus restores the privacy debate within the public arena

Security applications for converging technologies : impact on the constitutional state and the legal order

The impact of converging technologies on legal practice and criminology is being investigated in a forward looking study intended for practitioners and policy makers in the field of legislation, crime prevention, and law enforcement. This report consists of three parts. The first part describes the state of the art and future expectations on nano-, bio-, ICT and cognitive science and technology, as well as their convergence. The second part describes the (future) applicability of converging technologies to our application domain, in particular in three cases. This part ends with scenarios that are used as a means to ‘visualize’ the developments and an input for the impact analysis. In the third part the scenarios are analysed on their ethical, legal and social implications. This part describes the major social and normative trends that are observed