Theoretical framework for privacy in interpersonal information communication

Abstract

In the world of Internet, the number of users and applications has been increasing unprecedentedly, as well as the complexity of interactions. Users communicate directly as well as through applications and the services that each of them in turn invoke. In this fast increasing complexity, users not only share their personal information intentionally to gain a benefit, but does inadvertently end up giving away much more information than what they will willingly give, compromising privacy requirement of not only themselves but that of their contacts as well. The outcomes of earlier studies swing from too simple postulation of tradeoff between secrecy and benefit of sharing, to too complex definitions, both of which makes privacy enforceability practically hard in the current and future scenarios, while preserving universality. This paper provides a way for theoretically capturing the complex relationship of interpersonal information communication by providing a framework within which any systems interpersonal information and its communication can be dynamically modeled but yet its applicability is not restricted to only a subset of application contexts or locations or time. This model provides the necessary theoretical foundation for analyzing the different user requirement attributes like sharing and secrecy, whose complex interplay makes up for the notion of Privacy. From simple clear evidence of presenting the relationship between sharing and secrecy, to the ability of this framework to capture dynamic user and group behavior within a system is presented. This paper also lays the road ahead of how this model can be used to predict user aspirations and arrive at privacy policy specifications for any given system.