Conceptions of Privacy in the Digital Era: Perceptions of Slovak Citizens

Abstract

In the digital era, citizens’ daily lives are taking place both in the physical and digital realms. At the same time, even the most mundane activities are increasingly affected by offline as well as online surveillance. The privacy paradigm suggests that there is a difference between the private and public spheres of life, and that with technological advancement the demarcation lines between these spheres have become blurred. As a consequence, citizens’ conceptions of privacy are becoming more fluid, nuanced, context-dependent, and socially determined. This gives rise to a need to reconceptualize what privacy means and how citizens think about its boundaries. To investigate citizens’ conceptions of privacy, we conducted six focus groups in Slovakia aimed at exploring people’s attitudes toward privacy and encompassing their experiences and rationalizations (including possible alterations) of behavior in a variety of everyday environments. The analysis suggests that privacy is a complex phenomenon that is understood as an interplay between different privacy norms guiding specific contexts and more general approaches to privacy. We identify four privacy environments (a controlled private space, a [voluntarily] shared private space, a transactional public space, and a non-controllable public space) and three privacy approaches (the reservations approach, the trade-off approach, and the death of privacy approach) whose interplay constitutes individuals’ conceptions of privacy. In addition, the acceptance of loss of privacy seems to depend on a perception of legitimacy, control over the mechanisms of surveillance that individuals encounter, and trust toward the data processor.