Keywords

Defining Privacy

The title of this book is Human privacy in virtual and physical worlds. Although the title may appear straightforward, the concepts it explores are far from simple. Just defining human privacy is a challenging endeavor. Consider the range of definitions for privacy that appear in scholarly journals and books:

  • From an economics journal: “Privacy is used today in at least three senses. First, it is used to mean the concealment of information; indeed, this is its most common meaning today. Second, it is used to mean peace and quiet, as when someone complains that telephone solicitations are an invasion of his privacy. Third, it is used as a synonym for freedom and autonomy.” (Posner, 1981, p. 405).

  • From a philosophy encyclopedia: “We can see that there is no single definition, analysis or meaning of the term ‘privacy’, either in ordinary language or in philosophical, political and legal discourse. The concept of privacy has broad historical roots in legal, ethical, sociological and anthropological discourses.” (Roessler & DeCrew, 2023, p.1)

  • From an information systems journal: “Privacy is a commodity that can be exchanged for perceived net benefits” (Zhu et al., 2023, p. 295 ).

  • From a sociology journal: “Privacy is the ability of individuals to control the terms under which their personal information is acquired and used ” (Culnan & Bies, 2003, p. 326 ).

  • From an architecture journal: “ Privacy is a process whereby a person sometimes wants to be separated and at other times wants to be in contact with other people.” (Shah & Kesan, 2007, p. 353). 

From these five definitions, readers may observe varied interpretations of privacy across academic disciplines. Some authors provide very narrow views of privacy while other authors acknowledge that even within a discipline, there is no common definition. One major contribution of this book is its ability to confront readers with both familiar and unfamiliar readings of privacy in all its complexity.

The term “virtual world” featured in the book’s title refers to digital spaces that depend on computer technologies. In these spaces, privacy is commonly understood in terms of information privacy or communication privacy. Conversely, the term “physical world” points to analog spaces where individuals are not connected to computing devices. In this realm, privacy is often thought of in terms of bodily or territorial privacy.

While the distinction between the virtual and physical worlds serves as a helpful framework for introducing the book's comprehensive aims, this dichotomy is ultimately misleading. This ambiguity stems from the increasing interaction between the virtual and physical realms in today’s world.

Communications privacy, for example, can relate to preventing unauthorized eavesdropping in the physical world or deterring similar invasions in online communications. To illustrate the interaction between the physical and virtual worlds, consider a face-to-face conversation in the physical realm that is digitally recorded without knowledge or consent. This recording could then be stored or disseminated in the virtual world, highlighting the complex interplay between physical and virtual realms.

In addition to grappling with the tension between the virtual and physical worlds, readers will explore a variety of other dichotomies in this book. These dichotomies include distinctions between public and private, descriptive and prescriptive approaches to privacy, the intrinsic versus instrumental value of privacy, and between privacy and security. More broadly, the book examines the tension between the best interests, rights, and preferences of the individual as compared to those of the group.

Viewing Privacy from Multiple Disciplines

Addressing privacy in the modern context is what is often termed a “wicked problem.” Coined by Rittel and Weber in 1973, this concept refers to a problem that is socially complex, involving multiple stakeholders with differing perceptions, preferences, and levels of power. This book aims to expand scholars’ understanding of privacy by introducing perspectives on human privacy from humanistic, social scientific, design, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) disciplines.

Most of the authors of these chapters initially collaborated to teach an interdisciplinary course on privacy to honors students from across the State of Arkansas and the Netherlands in the summer of 2023. One of us, Lynda Coon, who is the Dean of the Honors College, along with Noah Pittman, the Associate Dean, conceived and organized the course. They recruited faculty from diverse disciplines to each teach a module. As the course unfolded, we quickly realized that faculty members themselves gained valuable insights from interdisciplinary engagement. Eager to share this collective wisdom more broadly, we invited scholars from different departments to offer academic overviews that elucidate how their respective fields conceptualize, investigate, and recommend strategies to protect human privacy.

We guided the authors to make their work accessible to academics outside their own discipline. This meant clarifying terms and concepts that are often taken for granted within their own fields. Each chapter, therefore, begins with an overview of how the author's discipline approaches the study of privacy before diving into specialized topics. Our aim is to inspire other academics to broaden their research perspectives on privacy, moving beyond the limitations of a single disciplinary lens.

This introductory chapter sets up the tripartite structure for the entire book: foundations of human privacy, technical views on privacy, and domain-specific views of privacy. Both philosophy and anthropology underpin our understanding of human privacy as a construct deeply embedded in culture, psychology, and society, encompassing norms and values. Philosophy further delves into the ethics of privacy, shifting the discussion from merely defining privacy to what it ought to be. Technical perspectives on this subject aim to protect human privacy in an era where technologies increasingly intrude upon our lives, such as surveilling behaviors, collecting data, and monetizing information—often unbeknownst to us and without our explicit consent (Zuboff, 2019). The domain-specific views of privacy include perspectives from the fields of architecture, healthcare, archival, and supply chain disciplines.

Foundations of Human Privacy

Chapter 2, “Exploring Privacy from a Philosophical Perspective,” provides this volume with its intellectual and ethical anchor. Philosopher Sharon Mason deliberates historical definitions of privacy expressing tensions between the public and the private, in which the public and its utilitarian “good” often outweigh the importance of privacy to the individual. Surveying various philosophical paradigms swirling around the notion of privacy from Greek antiquity through the artificial intelligence revolution of the present day, Mason notes that what we moderns may privilege as a fundamental right of humans—the right to privacy—is a relative latecomer on the historical stage.

For ancient Greek philosophers, most famously Plato (d. 348 BCE) and Aristotle (d. 322 BCE), the concept of the public good thoroughly overshadowed thoughts about protecting one’s personal space, physical or mental. Public service in the world of the Greek polis or city-state triumphed over the pursuit of one’s own interests. In fact, the Greek term idios, referring to “one’s own,” represents the origin of the modern English word “idiot” because ancient Athenian citizens believed that those who stuck to their own or inhabited marginal spaces to the one side of civic government had more in common with animals and monsters than they did with their compatriots—clearly a negative register of selfhood.

Philosophical stars from the eighteenth century ran with classicizing comprehensions of the private. For David Hume (d. 1776), the private was the reserve of personal interest, existing outside the scope of governmental control. Mason rightly notes that the industrial revolution and its technological interventions sparked the first major Western rewriting of the role of privacy in society. In the nineteenth century, theorists of the private–public divide introduced the concept of the “inviolate personality,” that is, the “right to one’s personality” as free from external pressures. This shift in the cultural reading of privacy partially stemmed from advancements in print culture, bringing to the broad population gossip tracts and pamphlet diatribes against well-known persons, thereby foregrounding the idea that privacy exists as a kind of reified, natural human right.

This historical trajectory shot western constructions of privacy into the realm of inalienable rights, where it joined the company of other nebulous products of the Enlightenment, such as “liberty” and “equality.” From there, philosophers added conversations about the intrinsic value of privacy into the intellectual mix, debates about the degree to which privacy inhabits the space of an inalienable right. Mason transfers abstract, philosophical discussion about the intrinsic nature of philosophy to the critical themes covered in this book: security, transparency, and democracy, thereby offering an exceptional theoretical framework for the chapters that address artificial intelligence (AI), Web 3, blockchain, supply chain, health care, big data, and more. Here, ethical dilemmas complexify notions of privacy, especially since privacy has become increasingly a commodity of exchange in which wealthier players can buy and sell at higher rates than those with fewer resources. Overall, Mason stands back from reading privacy purely as a commodity by offering a provocative interpretation of privacy as a key component in Western constructions of the self, an ability to claim one’s existence as a human in an era disrupted by technological surveillance of personhood in its most intimate details.

Chapter 3, “What’s so special about private parts,” is a tour-de-force through global readings of privacy within the shifting landscape of what it means to be “public.” Cultural Anthropologist Simon Hawkins centers his reading of privacy strongly on different political and cultural spaces: North Africa, the Middle East, the United Kingdom (U.K.), and Eastern Europe. His analysis problematizes a progressive reading of privacy; that is, privacy as the litmus test of more developed and sophisticated cultures, a kind of natural right for citizens in those spaces. Rather, in Hawkins’ capable hands, privacy becomes a moving target influenced by vectors of class, race, ethnicity, gender, political persuasion, and the positioning of the body in space. Three objects glue this thick analysis together: bike, door, and toilet.

Bike. Hawkins begins his tour with an event taking place in central London—World Naked Bike Day—in which cohorts of nude bicyclists disrupt western notions of privacy by exhibiting their private parts within the full gaze of urban city-dwellers. Shielded by a battalion of bikes, these protesters draw attention to what should be more shocking than a penis or a vagina: environmental devastation on a global scale. The bikers’ collective presence, however, safeguards their own nudity from intense surveillance, thus complexifying further the idea of privacy in the very public space of a bustling city.

Door. Moving from the affluent ranks of nude bikers, Hawkins turns his attention to a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, Egypt, al-Zawiya al-Hamra, the brainchild of modernizing President Anwar el-Sadat (d. 1981). Here, newly constructed doors leading into apartments mark the intrusion of western notions of privacy onto spaces where these ideas sit uncomfortably with the historical rhythms of communal practice. What in the United States (U.S.) might comfort a viewer—the door as indicator of intimate, familial space—transmutes into a darker presence et al.-Zawiya al-Hamra. Here, the door functions as a roadblock to the kind of communal intimacy shared among extended families, who previously circulated in and out of each other’s abodes. The fallout opens a window onto the negative side of universalizing concepts of privacy.

Toilet. Door cum signifier of privacy does not hold up to the test of time. Ancient cultures, like that of Classical Athens, possessed (seemingly) strict divides between the public and the private, the latter being heavily associated with elite, urban female bodies. Yet this same culture embraced the material reality of the communal toilet, a practice shared by ancient Romans. What a modern reader might consider the ultimate marker of privacy—defecating in spaces off limits to an audience—evaporates in the gap between the ancient and the contemporary, another indication that notions of privacy remain historically unstable.

Hawkins’ chapter sets the theoretical agenda for this volume. He locates places, where shifting political structures, such as the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, compel women into the public and men into the private. He contests the American “white-picket fence” as an icon of privacy. Finally, Hawkins so successfully problematizes the very idea of privacy that readers walk away challenged to rethink the map of the fictional divide between the private and the public.

Technical Views of Privacy

The authors of Chapters 4 through 8 are experts in technology-related fields, including computer science, data science, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, and information systems. These chapters provide a comprehensive analysis of both the threats to, and potential solutions for, online privacy. The authors of Chapter 4 note that maintaining privacy on the Internet is challenging due to the lack of defined boundaries and varying laws across countries that personal data may traverse. Unlike the physical world where entering a new jurisdiction is clearly marked, online data in virtual worlds can flow through multiple countries and be subject to different regulations and surveillance levels, often without the user's awareness.

The five technology chapters focus upon information privacy, which can be defined as “the ability of individuals to control the terms under which their personal information is acquired and used” (Culnan & Bies, 2003, p. 326). Specializing in technology-related disciplines, these chapters explore the safeguarding of personally identifiable information (PII), which encompasses data that can identify or verify an individual or a group of people (AICPA/CICA, 2020). Examples of PII range from basic details like name and home address to more sensitive information such as criminal or healthcare records, and extend to online activity data like IP addresses, email accounts, and website cookies.

How can PII be protected better? Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the human aspect of privacy protection, including government regulations, industry standards, organizational practices, and individual behaviors to safeguard privacy. Chapters 6 through 8 interrogate new technical approaches to privacy protection, including Web3, multi-party computation, and zero-knowledge proofs. Both human and technical solutions are needed to better protect PII.

Chapter 4, titled “Privacy in the Digital Age: Navigating the Risks and Benefits of Cybersecurity Measures,” is authored by Chris Farnell, Philip Huff, and William Cox. The chapter opens with a definition of cybersecurity as “the protective actions taken to safeguard digital information and processes that an organization deems necessary for its successful operations.” The authors outline the most common threats to cybersecurity, categorizing them as attack vectors: Denial of Service (DoS), Man in the Middle (MitM), and Spoofing Attacks.

A DoS attack inundates a computer server with numerous fake requests, thereby denying legitimate users access. A MitM assault occurs when an external attacker intercepts, modifies, or suppresses information traveling over the network, deceiving both the sending and receiving computers into believing they are communicating normally. In the case of spoofing attacks, an illegitimate actor masquerades as a legitimate one, tricking an unsuspecting individual into revealing PII. Robust cybersecurity practices are essential for defending against these types of attacks.

The authors delve into ways organizations and individuals can protect PII. For organizations, they recommend following the Privacy Control Catalog provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This standard offers guidance on administrative, technical, and physical controls. For individuals, the authors suggest using non-attributable networks like The Onion Router (TOR), privacy-enhancing operating systems such as the Debian Linux-based Tails OS, and adopting protective social behaviors, including the deployment of multiple online personas.

Chapter 5, “Data Governance, Privacy, and Ethics,” written by Karl Schubert and David Barrett, expands on the theme of how organizations should safeguard privacy. While the preceding chapter surveyed various types of cybersecurity attacks, this chapter commences by discussing the repercussions of data breaches for both individuals and organizations. The financial implications outlined are staggering, highlighting the need for governments and organizations to improve their practices.

On the government front, the authors explore key legal and regulatory frameworks that direct data privacy and ethics. These include the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and several U.S. federal and State laws. The authors observe that European actions, particularly through the GDPR, are far more advanced than those in the rest of the world.

Given the weaker regulatory landscape in the U.S., the onus falls on organizations to self-govern when it comes to data. To assist in this effort, the authors present a comprehensive framework for data governance aimed at protecting PII and ensuring the ethical use of data. Importantly, they also acknowledge the organizational challenges involved in adopting data governance and offer advice for overcoming resistance.

Chapter 6, titled “Web2 versus Web3 information privacy: an Information Systems discipline perspective” by Mary Lacity and Erran Carmel, also centers on protecting PII, but with a technical solution called Web3. The authors begin by summarizing the Information Systems (IS) research on information privacy. First, they note that IS scholars primarily examine online information privacy in the context of Web2, which is the dominant version of Internet. With Web2, individuals rely on centralized platform providers to access online services using accounts and passwords; individuals also submit other PII as required by the centralized platform providers. Second, the authors explain how IS scholars have conceptualized and scrutinized information privacy in terms of an individual’s information privacy concerns and have examined why these concerns do not prevent individuals from disclosing personal information with centralized platform providers; the phenomenon is called the privacy paradox.

The authors mine four theoretical explanations for the privacy paradox: (1) privacy calculus, where individuals assess the trade-offs between the risks and benefits of disclosing PII; (2) privacy fatigue, characterized by emotional exhaustion from continuous efforts to protect PII; (3) trust in centralized platform providers, which encourages users to share PII; and (4) lack of user choice, where PII disclosure is mandated by centralized platforms to access their services. Together, the four theories show how difficult it is to protect PII in Web2.

Introducing the concept of Web3, the authors present a revolutionary approach to enhancing online privacy. Web3 represents the next era of the Internet, founded on decentralized technologies and applications such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. In contrast to Web2, Web3 allows individuals to access services without revealing PII to a central authority. This improved privacy is technically facilitated through the integration of digital wallets, cryptography, and distributed ledgers, commonly known as blockchain. Although Web3 is still a new idea comprising emerging technologies, education plays a crucial role in accelerating its adoption.

Chapter 7, titled “Multi-party Computation: Privacy in Coopetition,” is authored by Daniel Conway and Kiran Garimella. The authors present an innovative approach to calculating information among trusted parties without revealing anyone's confidential data. The chapter elucidates the methodology through easily understandable examples, such as, “How does my annual salary bonus compare with others?” and “Who is everyone going to vote for as leader?” In these scenarios, all parties are interested in the answers but do not want to disclose their actual bonuses or votes.

The method involves each participant generating random numbers and a calculated number that sums to their bonus (in the first example) or indicates their vote (in the second example). The ingenious aspect of this method is that it does not just aim to protect private data—it avoids sharing private data altogether! The authors note that multi-party computation is computationally intense, which means it will consume significant computer resources if the number of parties is large. Moreover, this approach does necessitate trust among the parties involved. Hence, the chapter incorporates the term “coopetition,” which denotes trusted collaboration among traditional competitors to answer questions of mutual interest, such as “Am I paying the same for materials?” or “Does anyone else see suspicious cybersecurity activity on their networks?” The authors demonstrate the wide range of contexts in which this method can be useful, including auctions, voting, financial transactions, supply chains, fraud detection, genomic data sharing, and user authentication.

Dan Conway and Kiran Garimella are also the authors of Chapter 8, titled “Zero-knowledge proofs and privacy: A technical look at privacy.” In this chapter, the authors explore another kind of privacy-enhancing algorithm known as the zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). They define ZKP as a method by which one party can prove to another that they possess a particular identity, item, or piece of knowledge without revealing the specifics of what that identity, item, or knowledge is. Like the previous chapter, the authors provide illustrative examples to help non-technical readers grasp the core concepts and the myriad applications, such as digital verification, secure messaging, voting, healthcare privacy, location privacy, and many others. Readers with a more technical background will appreciate the detailed discussions on specific ZKPs and their advantages and drawbacks, including Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge (zkSNARK), Zero-Knowledge Scalable Transparent Argument of Knowledge (zkSTARK), commitment schemes, and homomorphic encryption.

All ZKPs strive for completeness and convincingness. They are sound, preventing dishonest actors from proving false statements, and they enhance privacy by ensuring that no private data is revealed. While multi-party computation requires a certain level of trust among the participants and becomes computationally intensive as it scales, some forms of zero-knowledge proofs are computationally efficient. These proofs eliminate the need for parties to trust one another, as they can instead place their trust in the proofs themselves.

Domain-Specific Views of Privacy

Chapters 9 through 12 dive into the exploration of privacy across diverse domains including architecture, healthcare, library sciences (archival), and supply chains. Each field offers a unique perspective and set of challenges concerning privacy. Architects bring the nuanced interplay between spaces and privacy; architectural scholars analyze how design can both enhance and inhibit the privacy of individuals within different environments. In the realm of healthcare, scholars grapple with the delicate balance between the laws and ethics of safeguarding individual information privacy while ensuring public welfare. Turning to library sciences, scholars in this field explore the ethical considerations and best practices for archiving and providing access to information, ensuring a balance between accessibility and confidentiality. Lastly, in the context of supply chains, the emphasis is on balancing the collection of data on employees and customers to enhance service delivery against the obligations to safeguard employee and customer privacy. Supply chain scholars investigate strategies and frameworks to ensure that the pursuit of operational efficiency does not compromise individual privacy rights. As the chapter descriptions will show, these chapters provide a multifaceted exploration of privacy across different disciplines, highlighting the commonalities, differences, and unique challenges each field faces in protecting individual privacy while meeting broader objectives,

In Chapter 9, titled “An Architect's View of Privacy,” we, the editors, engaged in a thought-provoking interview with Marlon Blackwell, the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture and a Distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. In addition to his academic role, he is the founder and principal of Marlon Blackwell Architects (MBA).

This conversation concentrated on the design philosophy of Blackwell, an esteemed American Institute of Architects (AIA) award recipient, focusing on his approach to privacy. Several themes pivotal to architectural privacy were explored. Initially, he considered the influence of culture on the interconnection between privacy and comfort, observing that individualistic societies tend to prioritize privacy more than their collective counterparts. Subsequently, he deliberated how primary, secondary, and tertiary spaces can cultivate private moments within public environments, illustrated by examples from MBA’s portfolio such as an alcove in a church, a recessed wall in a school, and a solitary bench in a garden.

Moreover, Blackwell examined the dual role of light and sound as both disruptors and facilitators of privacy, illustrated through various projects by MBA. A central theme emerged that encapsulates Blackwell’s design ethos: ennobling the prosaic. For him, architecture ennobles the prosaic by imbuing ordinary, everyday things with a sense of nobility and significance. This chapter features a vivid example of this philosophy in action, showcasing the transformation of a simple welding shed into a sacred space for the congregation of Saint Nicholas Eastern Orthodox Church.

Chapter 10 is titled “Healthcare Privacy in an Electronic Data Age” by D. Micah Hester. The principle of confidentiality of patient information in healthcare, which has been integral since the days of Hippocrates, signifies patients’ right to control personal details of their life. This obligation, falling on healthcare professionals, is challenged by the fact that multiple entities and people, including diagnosticians, therapists, social workers, chaplains, medical transcriptionists, medical records clerks, and insurance providers access the information. With the advancement in technology, digitization of healthcare records, and the rise of telemedicine, maintaining confidentiality has become more challenging.

Hester discusses the complex interplay between patient privacy and the need for information sharing in healthcare, outlining the various ethical and legal challenges that arise. Medical confidentiality is not absolute; it is guided by laws such as the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which provide protective frameworks and conditions for permissible breaches. These breaches include reporting communicable diseases, cases indicating imminent harm, legal mandates like court orders, and certain safety and protection factors like suspicions of abuse or criminal activity.

This chapter concludes by arguing that healthcare organizations must foster a culture of confidentiality, even if absolute guarantees of privacy are not feasible. By promoting and adhering to such a culture, both institutions and healthcare providers can adopt practices that intentionally and proficiently mitigate the tangible risks to the privacy of patients, participants, and the broader community they serve.

Chapter 11, “Privacy Considerations in Archival Practice and Research,” details the delicate dance among invested parties—donors, estates, the dead, archivists, administrators, the public—who negotiate the line between opening access to sensitive materials and shutting that access down. Following the lead of previous chapters, authors Katrina Windon and Joshua Youngblood clarify that there is no one approach to archival privacy in North America; nor is there a single international legal system. The fact that archival collections often represent a snapshot of history frozen in time, determining when or if to grant access to the public is a very dicey political game.

Windon and Youngblood give a series of fascinating cases where archival behavior went astray. They cite the infamous example of author Franz Kafka (d. 1924), who had requested that his executor burn his papers after his death. The executor of Kafka’s estate, Max Bord, not only refused to honor Kafka’s wishes, but he also went on to publish the writer’s papers, which eventually found their way from Europe to the National Library of Israel, a journey underscoring the disconnect between an individual’s personal preference and an institution’s decision to open access based on the idea of the common good.

Archivists are also sensitive to the fact that authoritarian regimes have silenced the voices of at-risk populations. A disturbing case involves the Stasi Records Archive in Berlin, where 111,000 meters of documents contain a wealth of data retrieved through unrelenting, clandestine surveillance of citizens living in the Eastern Bloc. Given the manner of how they were collected, should these documents be open to the public?

Archival collections offer their users a “shot in time,” a recording of historical events, such as political protests, in which the participants may or may not know that photographic and videographic technology has recorded their physical involvement in controversial movements, storing this visual information in archival repositories. Such “ephemeral” data, that is, information not taken with an eye toward recording stories in perpetuity but merely capturing them in a moment in time, presents yet another set of archival challenges in an age when law enforcement officials are combing archives searching for potential terrorists, insurrectionists, and anarchists.

What is fascinating here is the authors’ focus on the person of the archivist, that impresario of access to sensitive material. What role in archival ethics does the archivist play? How much power does the archivist have to open and close access? In answering these questions, Windon and Youngblood draw on “best practices” available for archival access, noting that these guidelines are in no way consistent across the globe. They share the regulatory framework of their own institution, the University of Arkansas Special Collections, where the demands of a Land-Grant university necessitate unrestricted access but the realities of the history of this state often make impossible—or extremely thorny—that mandate.

Our final chapter, “Employee and customer information privacy concerns in supply chain management,” is written by Marc Scott, Matthew Waller, and Brian Fugate. Retailers and their logistics partners, in their pursuit of enhanced competitiveness, harness sophisticated technologies that gather PII data, aiming to elevate customer service and bolster employee efficiency. However, employees and customers often raise privacy concerns.

While earlier chapters turned to customer and user privacy concerns, this chapter uniquely addresses the concerns of employees. Today, there's a growing trend of employees being watched through surveillance cameras and wearable sensors that track their health, emotions, and behaviors. Such monitoring has led many employees to believe that their privacy rights are being violated, making them vulnerable to potential mistreatment or bias. Striking the right balance between the organization's need for data—related to safety, efficiency, and compliance—and respecting employees’ privacy is a complex issue.

This chapter highlights individual and cultural variances regarding employee data collection acceptance. The research summarized indicates varying perceptions based on personality traits and workplace type. For instance, individuals with higher neuroticism and extroversion levels expressed fewer privacy concerns than their counterparts with lower levels of these traits. Job nature also plays a role: manual laborers expressed greater surveillance concerns than those in non-manual roles. Furthermore, an organization's culture has a significant impact: employees in companies with a nurturing culture showed less resistance to monitoring compared to those in more bureaucratic settings.

The analysis also focuses on work environment privacy, defined as the ability of the employee to control sensory stimuli in the work environment. Organizations should craft workspaces that consider visual, acoustic, spatial, and even olfactory aspects. As highlighted by insights from both our supply chain and architectural experts: no one wants to work in an exposed, cramped, loud, and stinky environment.

Themes Across Chapters

As a complex social construct, academics approach the study and conceptualization of privacy differently across disciplines. One unanticipated yet intriguing discovery was that we often share more common ground than initially presumed, even if we sometimes employed different terminology. Four recurring themes emerge across the chapters in this book:

  1. 1.

    Privacy is best understood as a multifaceted, contextual, and temporal concept. Our collective efforts did not yield a singular, all-encompassing definition of privacy, which seems fitting given its complexity. Throughout the chapters, authors excavate various facets of privacy, including acoustic, bodily, communication, data, information, olfactory, spatial, territorial, and visual privacy. They also examine privacy from the perspectives of different entities, from individual consumers, decision-makers, employees, and patients to larger units like families, groups, organizations, and societies. Attempting to condense privacy into a singular definition would inevitably diminish the depth and nuance of understanding, as would trying to imagine certain “universal” truths about privacy operating globally.

  2. 2.

    Individuals’ rights to privacy are often in conflict with the group’s desire or right to know. Many authors delve into the tension between the rights and interests of the individual and those of the collective. Technologists, for example, weigh the protection of individual user data against the broader demands to authenticate users to enhance cybersecurity. Healthcare professionals strive to shield patient information while also safeguarding society at large. Archivists grapple with the duality of defending individual data in archives and fulfilling their duty to disseminate information to students, researchers, and the public. Similarly, supply chain experts navigate the delicate balance between an organization's data collection imperatives and the privacy concerns of employees and customers. These tensions signify the complexity of privacy considerations.

    The concept of power plays a pivotal role in determining which stakeholders ultimately hold sway. Given that governments typically wield more influence than organizations, and organizations hold more power than individuals, it becomes imperative to establish robust governmental regulations to safeguard individuals from potential infringements of their privacy by organizations. Overall, several authors mentioned complying with privacy laws as a minimum requirement for striking the balance between individual and group needs.

  3. 3.

    Privacy law is pervasive. While no legal scholars contributed to the chapters in this book, privacy law permeates many discussions because professionals in every field must adhere to restrictions relevant to their jurisdiction. Although American scholars wrote this book, four chapters cover the European Union (E.U.)'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR applies to all companies processing the personal data of E.U. residents, regardless of the company's location. American companies must adhere to GDPR if they offer goods or services to, monitor the behavior of, or have business operations concerning E.U. citizens. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines and reputational damage. Several U.S. federal laws are discussed in this book, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), along with state-specific laws in the U.S. Most authors advocate privacy-enhancing policies and practices beyond mere legal compliance.

  4. 4.

    Privacy prescription. The chapters written by the philosopher and the anthropologist caution against assuming that individual privacy is universally valued and should invariably be safeguarded. In contrast, the authors of the technology and domain-specific chapters predominantly advocate for the valuation and protection of individual privacy, emphasizing that such protection should exceed privacy laws.

The authors discussing technology recommend various measures to bolster individual privacy. These measures include administrative, technical, and physical controls; data governance; embracing technology decentralization (Web 3.0); and employing algorithms like multi-party computation and zero-knowledge proofs. The authors of the domain-specific chapters interrogate privacy-enhancing solutions within distinct fields:

  • In architecture, by creating avenues for private moments within public spaces.

  • In healthcare, by fostering a pervasive culture of privacy.

  • In archiving, by adhering to a decision tree approach.

  • In supply chains, by striking a balance among organizational, employee, and consumer needs.

Across the diverse disciplines and perspectives presented, it is evident that privacy remains a dynamic, multifaceted realm necessitating nuanced understanding and approach. Clearly, privacy is a moving target when dropped into various contexts and spaces across the globe.

Ultimately, readers must determine how insights from various disciplines might influence their own research and teaching. In our concluding remarks, we each reflect on how learning from fellow scholars has influenced our work.

Mary, as we noted, is an information systems scholar who examines technical solutions for protecting personally identifiable information. This book broadened her perspective on privacy. Mary is less inclined to think that technologies alone will protect online privacy. The chapters on philosophy, cultural anthropology, and the domain-specific chapters illuminated the historic and contextual understanding needed to solve the “wicked” problem of online privacy, assuming of course, that privacy protection is deemed valuable by individuals within a specific context.

More specifically, one of Mary’s current research and teaching interests are metaverses, which are three-dimensional, computer-generated virtual worlds one visits with an avatar. Marlon Blackwell’s chapter on architectural privacy in physical spaces has had a profound effect on her thinking about designing virtual spaces. Most virtual worlds are designed to be expansive, open public spaces. So far in metaverses’ development, the virtual worlds are rather barren unless a particular event like a fashion show or concert are announced, so she had never thought about spatial privacy. As metaverse adoption grows, she now thinks about designing virtual spaces where an avatar might have a private moment.

Mary’s co-editor, Lynda, is a historian of early medieval era Europe (ca. 600–900) with a special focus on gender, visual culture, and religion (Coon, 2011). For Lynda, two things stand out here. First, an appreciation for the historical rhythms of the subject of privacy, from classicizing discourses of what belongs to the individual in contrast to the hegemony of the city-state and empire. The notion that the private existed as a reified, inalienable right simply did not appear in the West before the advent of the Industrial Age. Rather, premodern cultures in the West blurred the line between the private and the public in ways that seem either off-putting or even illogical to contemporary societies. The classical communal toilet—be it located in ancient Athens or Rome—represents a case in point as does the fact that Roman elites often conducted political business in their bedrooms. Marlon Blackwell notes the shared space of the familial bed in later medieval England surprises us moderns; monasteries too preferred corporate living—in the bedroom, in the toilet, in the garden, in the basilica—due to the dangers of sin which could penetrate monastic bodies seeking solitary spaces outside of the watchful gaze of the abbot.

The era of the Enlightenment and the Victorian era in Britain polarized the notion of the private vs. the public, bringing us to the second key point about this volume. What may be read as positive outcomes of philosophical discourse in the eighteenth century materialized into a darker legacy of surveillance and discipline designed to produce “good” citizens and to reform those falling into abyss of crime and immorality. What struck her most in the chapters devoted to modern-day privacy, technology, poverty, and labor is that certain themes are strangely haunted by the Victorian past. Nowhere is this haunting clearer than in how the control of bodies in supply chain workspaces eerily echoes the disciplinary techniques of the Victorian prison and factory, where docile bodies endured relentless surveillance, embodied by the all-seeing eye of the Panopticon, the ultimate shadowing system designed to make workers or inmates feel as if they were being watched at every moment even if they were not.

Perfected by Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832), the Panopticon took the physical presence of the jailor or factory floor-manager and inscribed it onto the impersonal architecture of prison and industrial workspace. Whereas in the medieval monastery, monks went through their daily paces conscious of the watchful gaze of the omnipotent Deity, Victorian laborers and inmates operated under a regiment in which they could be observed at any moment by those in control of their lives, but they could not see their controller, whose presence was obfuscated behind a system of blinds and spotlights emanating from the warden’s box. The prisoner and the factory laborer were to become the masters of their own productive habits due to the fear of all-encompassing, punitive supervision. In Bentham and other nineteenth-century reformers’ view the endgame was self-evident: the moral reform of those now had lapsed and the improved efficiency of those toiling under dire circumstances in the Victorian workhouse. These reforms then, theoretically speaking, led to an overall improvement of the common good and its overall happiness.

Taking the philosophical paradigm of the Panopticon on a road trip to the modern workplace of truck or supply chain warehouse, it is possible to detect strains of Utilitarian philosophy in the present era. Cameras installed inside of truck cabs monitor the driving behaviors of truckers, Smartwatches worn on employee wrists to gage the efficiency of their movements, and ultrasonic bracelets monitoring laborers’ engagement high-tech equipment prove that we have entered a new era of the Panopticon, where the coercive power of jailor and faculty floor-supervisor no longer merely transfers to the architecture of the prison or factory. Now that surveillance-regime is miniaturized. It can be worn, carried, or installed in proximity to its user.

As the chapters in this book have argued, the technological Panopticon of the contemporary world infringes on privacy and private space, often under the guise of the public good and capitalist efficiency, in ways that demand a second volume on Human Privacy devoted to this subject alone.