Introduction

Both ‘privacy’ and ‘informatics’ are semantically overloaded concepts; no broad consensus exists on a single definition of either. This chapter has the following objectives:

• – to provide an intuition of ‘privacy’ and of ‘informatics’;

• – to provide an understanding of relations between privacy and informatics;

• – to provide references to academic and other authoritative sources for further research.

Elaboration is provided on selected topics in this theme. For topics that are already described and discussed in existing sources, references are provided.

An intuition of privacy

At the risk of minor overlap with other chapters, a short characterization of privacy follows to keep this chapter self-contained. It is adapted from earlier work.

Privacy entails some desire to hide one's characteristics, choices, behaviour, and communication from scrutiny by others. A corollary is that privacy entails some desire to exercise control over the use of personal information, for example to prevent future misuse. Phrases commonly associated with privacy include ‘the right to be let alone’, meaning freedom of interference by others; ‘the selective control of access to the self or to one's group’, meaning the ability to seek or avoid interaction in accordance with the privacy level desired at a particular time; and ‘informational self-determination’, meaning the ability to exercise control over disclosure of information about oneself.

Contrary to what some believe, the rise of social media and ubiquitous computing does not imply the ‘end’ or ‘death’ of privacy. Rather, as Evgeny Morozov paraphrased from Helen Nissenbaum's book on contextual integrity in The Times Literary Supplement of 12 March 2010: ‘the information revolution has been so disruptive and happened so fast (…) that the minuscule and mostly imperceptible changes that digital technology has brought to our lives may not have properly registered on the social radar’. In her two and a half-year ethnographic study of American teens’ engagement with social network sites, danah boyd observed that teens ‘developed potent strategies for managing the complexities of and social awkwardness incurred by these sites’. So, rather than privacy being irrelevant to them, the teens found a way to work around the lack of built-in privacy. In conclusion: privacy is not dead.