Futures of privacy protection

A framework for creating scenarios of institutional change

Bibliographic Data

ID9845455
AuthorsMatti Minkkinen (0000-0002-6406-8093, University of Turku, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume73
Pages48-60
Publication date2015-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFutures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-3287 • E-ISSN: 1873-6378
PublisherElsevier BV (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1016/j.futures.2015.07.006
OpenAlexW1435768421
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited65

The future of privacy is a topical issue in the context of debates on mass surveillance and the increasing prevalence of social media sites in everyday life. Previous scenario studies on privacy have focused on macro trends and on forecasting technological developments, and claims about causal influences have remained implicit. This article presents an alternative approach for constructing scenarios of privacy protection. The article focuses on privacy protection as a social institution and builds on the theory of gradual institutional change. The article presents a scenario framework which includes three stages: (1) outlining the dynamics of privacy protection, (2) tracing historical processes and constructing a causal narrative, and (3) creating event-based scenarios. The resulting scenarios are narratives of plausible chains of events which are based on the results of the previous stages. The key difference to typical scenario approaches is the focus on specific actors and types of event sequences in privacy protection. The argument is that by lowering the level of abstraction in this way, researchers and decision-makers can gain a more profound understanding of possible future challenges in privacy protection and of key leverage points in the institutional change process

Argument (complex analysis · Business · Computer security · Context (archaeology · Futures contract · Information privacy · Leverage (statistics · Narrative · Privacy by Design · Computer Science · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access