Vol. 3: No. 1: 2021

Privacy Attitudes and Behaviors in the Age of Post-Privacy: An Empirical Approach

ABSTRACT

The digital world is a field of information and entertainment for users and a field of extraction of the most valuable good of recent years: personal data. How much of a threat to privacy is the collection and processing of data by third parties and what do people think about it? On the occasion of the extensive methods of surveilling citizens and collecting their data, this study attempts to contribute new empirical data evidence from the international research on the use of the Internet by the World Internet Project on attitudes and behaviors of individuals regarding online privacy and surveillance. The aim is to determine whether and to what extent the recorded concerns about the violation of privacy intersects with a growing acceptance of its very absence.

Data Perversion: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Datafication

ABSTRACT

This article adopts a psychoanalytic perspective and argues that users are in a perverse relationship with contemporary platforms. Following a review of recent critical scholarship on datafication, which places too much emphasis on platforms and situates users as helpless, the psychoanalytic concept of perversion is introduced. Perversion describes a relationship that is characterised by dominance, exploitation and dehumanization as well as care, love, and idealization. While the pervert (the platform and its owners and developers) is the perpetrator, the other (the user) is also actively participating in the perverse relationship. Contemporary relations are thus marked by foregrounding connectivity, convenience and communication which mask the violence of datafication. Such relations are upheld, because users affirmatively reproduce them by using highly attractive platforms which are customized for each individual. Psychoanalysis can thus offer a complex conceptualisation of the interplay between affirmation, attraction and exploitation that is immanent to platforms and users today.

Figuring Digital Cascades: Issue Framing in Digital Media Ecosystems

ABSTRACT

On November 17, 2015, the newly elected Canadian government led by Justin Trudeau made an announcement that became a turning point in the heated debate around the plan to build the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Ottawa. The government’s decision to scale the project down was massively republished and generated a heavy stream of 2,055 publications and interactions. The virality of such phenomena is sometimes described in the literature as an “information cascade” characterized by a complex and expanding series of media content that is republished, shared, and commented upon in digital public spheres, reaching a growing number of people. Our research aim is twofold. From a theoretical point of view, we combine Entman’s cascade model with the perspective of platform studies. From an empirical point of view, we put this model to the test through a case study of the cascading data flows that emerged during this public debate. We found three key factors that constituted and shaped this information cascade: 1) the economic structure of the Canadian media market, and especially the concentration of media ownership, which is notably high in the Canadian media ecosystem; 2) data-exchange mechanisms and algorithmic filtering that drive the process of news aggregation, quickly spreading media content without being a significant source of user engagement; 3) grassroots engagement in diasporic media, which activates micro public spheres around nested interests and political standpoints regarding the public issue.

Imagining the Commoning Library: Alter-Neoliberal Pedagogy in Informational Capitalism

ABSTRACT

The ascent of neoliberalism and informational capitalism has been largely successful in privatizing and re-regulating state-subject-market relations in ways that treat them “as if” they are a market situation. Here, we observe both the increasing commodification of digital forms of knowledge, as well as the commodification of the access to this knowledge. As predominantly non-commercial spaces, libraries serve the vital function of deflecting these developments. In this article, I argue for going one step further and imagining libraries asinstitutionalized and pedagogical spaces that can negotiate and transgress their institutional limits vis-à-vis public and private resources, discourses, policies, and technologies for the purpose of furthering the commons.In so doing, libraries serve as alter-neoliberal pedagogies, which democratize the construction and deconstruction of knowledge, as well as the access to them. Here, alternative literacies, ways of learning, and ways of being can be prefigured in practice. In imagining these conceptual potentialities of academic and public libraries, this article sets forth an initial agenda toward the commoning library.

Dark and Bright Patterns in Cookie Consent Requests

ABSTRACT

Dark patterns are (evil) design nudges that steer people’s behaviour through persuasive interface design. Increasingly found in cookie consent requests, they possibly undermine principles of EU privacy law. In two preregistered online experiments we investigated the effects of three common design nudges (default, aesthetic manipulation, obstruction) on users’ consent decisions and their perception of control over their personal data in these situations. In the first experiment (N = 228) we explored the effects of design nudges towards the privacy-unfriendly option (dark patterns). The experiment revealed that most participants agreed to all consent requests regardless of dark design nudges. Unexpectedly, despite generally low levels of perceived control, obstructing the privacy-friendly option led to more rather than less perceived control. In the second experiment (N = 255) we reversed the direction of the design nudges towards the privacy-friendly option, which we title “bright patterns”. This time the obstruction and default nudges swayed people effectively towards the privacy-friendly option, while the result regarding perceived control stayed the same compared to Experiment 1. Overall, our findings suggest that many current implementations of cookie consent requests do not enable meaningful choices by internet users, and are thus not in line with the intention of the EU policymakers. We also explore how policymakers could address the problem.