Privacy Expectations in Online Contexts: A New Approach for the Legal Protection of Privacy

• In Event: The Right to Speak and the Right to Remain Private

Abstract

Advances in digital networked communication technology over the last two decades have brought the issue of personal privacy into sharper focus within contemporary public discourse. For the legal protection of personal privacy under the Fourth Amendment, a person must have what courts term “a reasonable expectation of privacy.” For an expectation of privacy in a given context to be deemed reasonable, society must consider that expectation as reasonable, yet no empirical research has explored how society thinks about privacy in online contexts or what society in general would deem unreasonable or intrusive. This article provides such data, and finds that the degree to which Internet users feel the information they post online is "observable" by others, rather than the existing “content/noncontent” approach, underpins how people form their privacy expectations online. This "observability approach" represents an entirely new way to understand and gauge societal expectations of privacy in the networked world. Moreover, this new approach has important implications for guiding privacy jurisprudence in the future.

Authors

• Rebekah A Pure, U of California - Santa Barbara

• Miriam Metzger, U of California - Santa Barbara