Communication Privacy Research Articles

Digital Right Protection Principles under Digitalization

The article deals with the main principles of protecting digital rights – a new legal category – in the digital environment. In the context of the rapid development of information and communication technologies when cyberspace becomes the platform for interaction between citizens, society, and the state, there is a need to re-evaluate traditional approaches to rights exercised through digital communications on the Internet. The purpose of the study is to examine the legal features and properties of digital rights and identify the principles for protecting digital rights online. The authors employ the general scientific dialectical method as well as the formal legal, systemic structural, and formal logical cognition methods. The synergetic method is used to identify the features and properties of digital rights, this method helps to highlight new rules and new realities in the creative potential of chaos. The authors conclude that the scope of digital legal relations has the characteristics of cross-border and virtuality, thus ensuring the protection of digital rights should be carried out considering the special properties of this environment in which subjects cannot always be identified, and objects are characterized as simulations. Digital rights are obligations and other rights, the content and the exercise of which are determined by their specific features according to the rules and functioning principles of the information and telecommunication system. The holder of a digital right can be a person who can exercise the right. The authors identify the basic principles of protecting digital rights: the digital equality principle; the digital self-determination principle; the anonymous communication principle; the principle of confidentiality of private communications; the principle of privacy in the digital environment; the principle of secrecy of digital identification; the principle of security of data obtained through facial recognition technologies; the principle of erasure of digitalized personal information.

Privacy Management and Health Information Sharing via Contact Tracing during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Hypothetical Study on AI-Based Technologies

ABSTRACT In this study, we extended and tested the privacy calculus framework in the context of a hypothetical AI-based contact-tracing technology for application during the COVID-19 pandemic that is based on the communication privacy management and contextual integrity theories. Specifically, we investigated how the perceived privacy risks and benefits of information disclosure affect the public’s willingness to opt in and adopt contact-tracing technologies and how social and contextual factors influence their decision-making process. Four hundred eighteen adults in the United States participated in the study via Amazon Mechanical Turk in August 2020. A percentile bootstrap method with 5,000 resamples and bias-corrected 95% confidence intervals in structural equation modeling was used for data analysis. The participants’ privacy concerns and perceived benefits significantly influenced their opt-in and adoption intentions, which suggests that the privacy calculus framework applies to the context of COVID-19 contact-tracing technologies. Perceived social, personal, and reciprocal benefits were identified as crucial mediators that link contextual variables to both opt-in and adoption intentions. Although this study was based on a hypothetical AI-based contact-tracing app, our findings provide meaningful theoretical and practical implications for future research investigating the public’s technology adoption in contexts where tradeoffs between privacy risks and public health coexist.

Participant-Reported Experiences of Conversations about Sexually Transmitted Infections with Romantic Partners: Perceptions of Ownership and Privacy

ABSTRACT Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) affect millions of people annually, costing $16 billion in direct costs each year. Young adults often avoid communicating with their romantic partners about STIs for fear of stigma, thereby limiting their own and their partners’ ability to make informed and accurate health decisions. Using Communication Privacy Management theory as the theoretical framework, this study investigates how young adults in romantic relationships communicate about STIs with their partner. Findings show that participants report having conversations about STIs, but do not engage in regular STI testing, thereby limiting their ability to provide accurate information. They also discuss STIs in general rather than the communicating about their own history with STIs, being tested for STIs, or discussing STI test results with their partners. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Tor Hidden Services: A Systematic Literature Review

Anonymous communications networks were created to protect the privacy of communications, preventing censorship and traffic analysis. The most famous anonymous communication network is Tor. This anonymous communication network provides some interesting features. Among them, we can mention that Tor can hide a user’s IP address when accessing to a service such as the Web, and it also supports Tor hidden services (THS) (now named onion services) as a mechanism to conceal the server’s IP address, used mainly to provide anonymity to websites. THS is an important research field in Tor. However, there is a lack of reviews that sum up the main findings and research challenges. In this article, we present a systematic literature review that aims to offer a comprehensive overview of the research made on THS by presenting the state-of-the-art and the different research challenges to be addressed. This review has been developed from a selection of 57 articles and presents main findings and advances regarding Tor hidden services, limitations found, and future issues to be investigated.

Caring dataveillance and the construction of “good parenting”: Estonian parents’ and pre-teens’ reflections on the use of tracking technologies

Abstract Digital parenting tools, such as child-tracking technologies, play an ever-increasing role in contemporary child rearing. To explore opinions and experiences related to the use of such tracking devices, we conducted Q methodology and a semi-structured individual interview-study with Estonian parents (n=20) and their 8- to 13-year-old pre-teens (n=20). Our aim was to study how such caring dataveillance was rationalized within the families, and to explore the dominant parenting values associated with the practice. Relying upon communication privacy management theory, the issues of privacy related to such intimate surveillance were also studied. Three factors relating to the use of tracking technologies were extracted from both parents (Tech-Trusting Parent, Cautious Parent and Careful Authoritarian Parent) and pre-teens (Compliant Child, Autonomous Child, and Privacy-Sensitive Child). Tracking technologies were viewed as parental aids that made it possible to ease anxieties and provide assurance to parents and children alike. Although children did not associate the use of tracking technologies with intrusion on privacy, they expected to have a chance to coordinate their privacy boundaries.

Machine Learning Techniques for Malware Detection

The introduction of Transport Layer Security has been one of the most important contributors to the privacy and security of internet communications during the last decade. Malware authors have followed suit, using TLS to hide potentially dangerous network connections. Because of the growing use of encryption and other evasion measures, traditional content-based network traffic categorization is becoming more challenging. In this paper, we provide a malware classification technique that uses packet information and machine learning algorithms to detect malware. We employ the use of classification algorithms such as support vector machine and random forest. We start by eliminating characteristics that are highly correlated. We utilized the Random Forest method to choose only the 10 best characteristics from all the remaining features after eliminating the unnecessary ones. Following the feature selection phase, we employ several classification algorithms and evaluate their performance. Random forest algorithm performed exceptionally well in our experiments resulting in an accuracy score of over 0.99.

When Blockchain Meets Edge Intelligence: Trusted and Security Solutions for Consumers

Nowadays, mission-critical applications need delay-free responses, which can be achieved by computation at the edge devices known as edge computing. But edge computing needs cloud computing services to perform massive intelligent tasks like AI-based prediction and analysis, which still possesses high latency in making intelligent decisions. This can be resolved by bringing intelligence at the edge device or edge server, which introduces complex problems either at the proximity of edge devices, that is, consumer electronic devices (CED), or at the CED by bringing intelligence at the edge. The process of bringing intelligence to the edge is called edge intelligence (EI). The computation at edge servers is susceptible to various security and privacy issues and possesses high latency due to data propagation from the device to the dedicated edge server. To overcome the aforementioned issues, this study presents a blockchain-based edge intelligence system to ensure the CEDs' data security, privacy, latency, and efficiency. The proposed system uses public and private blockchains to fulfil the gaps mentioned above of the traditional systems. The public blockchain ensures CEDs' data communication privacy security, whereas private block-chain ensures secure communication among the EI servers. Then, we present the use case scenario of blockchain and edge intelligence (EI) in the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluate its performance over computation cost by comparing the intelligence at CED with the intelligence at the edge server and centralized cloud server (CCS).

What Influences Parents and Practitioners’ Decisions to Share Personal Information within an Early Help (Social Care) Context? Implications for Practice in Sharing Digital Data across Sectors

AbstractMeeting the multiple and often complex needs of families (children, young people and adults) within ‘Early Help’ support is dependent upon practitioners from different sectors sharing relevant and timely information, after gaining a family’s voluntary consent to share information. This article reports on qualitative one-to-one interviews with adults in families (n = 32), one mother/father dyad interview (n = 2) and focus groups with practitioners (n = 47) in five local authority areas in North East England receiving or providing Early Help support. We explored experiences of providing consent to share personal information and consider the usefulness of a digital health data system when providing Early Help support to families. Communication Privacy Management theory was used as a framework to analyse the data. Key themes in participants’ accounts include the degree of need for help and support; the importance of trusting relationships; stronger and structured joint working practices; and understanding how information is shared. This work provides insights into current information sharing practices for some of the most vulnerable families and the wider social contexts. It has implications for the usefulness of a digital data system that shares GP health data with Early Help services and suggests the role this could have in the parent–practitioner relationship.

Mother-Son Communication about Sex: Exploring Associations with Emerging Adult Sons’ Sexual Self-Esteem, Anxiety, and Satisfaction

Parent-child communication about sex and sexuality during adolescence may have long-lasting effects on children’s sexual self-concept and sexual health. As such, the present study explored the connection between mother-son communication about sex and sexuality while growing up and emerging adult sons’ sexual well-being. The sample consisted of 137 sexually active men between the ages of 18 and 23. The findings revealed that open mother-son communication was negatively associated with sons’ sexual anxiety and positively associated with sons’ sexual satisfaction, but that sons’ sexual self-esteem and anxiety did not account for the association between mother-son communication and sons’ sexual satisfaction. These findings provide preliminary evidence that sons’ perception that their mother provided an open and non-judgmental communication environment for discussing sex during adolescence is associated with positive sexual outcomes for emerging adult sons later in life. These findings and their implications are explored through the lens of communication privacy management theory.

‘It is not good for the person to be alone’: The capabilities approach and the right to communicate

For decades, attempts have been made to define a ‘right to communicate’. The rise of media technologies, which are characterized by abundance of channels and information, interactivity, mobility, and multimediated messaging, has allowed to rethink this right in a context converging traditional media and telecommunications and referring to communicating as an essential human capability. Applying Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to communications, we argue that communicating is a capability required to realize such functionings as participating in political, cultural, social, educational, and commercial life and is essential to promote belonging to a collective. The ‘negative’ right to free speech should be replaced by a positive right to communicate, which should include free speech, access to information, privacy, and utilization of communications in order to belong to a community.

Resources optimization for secure transmission in wireless powered communication networks

This paper studies the secrecy communication on wireless powered communication network (WPCN) in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system, where an energy harvest (EH) user sends confidential information to the hybrid access point (HAP) in the presence of a potential eavesdropper. We introduce a wireless powered cooperative jammer to improve the secrecy performance of this system. For the user and the jammer, we both consider the linear energy harvesting model and the nonlinear energy harvesting model. More specifically, the half-duplex WPCN is considered first. We study secrecy rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing the time allocation and the transmit power allocation for the HAP, the jammer and the user over sub-carriers. The nested form algorithm is proposed to solve the original non-convex problem, where one-dimension search method is used at the outer layer and a convex approximation algorithm by leveraging DC-based optimization is adopted at the inner layer. Then, the full-duplex WPCN is considered. We formulated the secrecy rate maximization problem and optimized the transmit power by using the DC algorithm and convex optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme dramatically enhances the secrecy rate compared to the benchmark schemes.

Henry Dundas: A ‘Great Delayer’ of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Henry Dundas, first viscount Melville (1742–1811), lord advocate in Scotland, MP for Edinburgh and Midlothian, first lord of the admiralty, home secretary and the first secretary of state for war, was one of the most powerful politicians in the eighteenth-century British parliament. His involvement in the gradual abolition of the slave trade after 1792 was amongst the most controversial episodes of his career. His role has attracted much interest in the last few years, although there are two irreconcilable schools of thought amongst historians. This article reassesses Dundas's role in the gradual abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. His contributions in the houses of parliament between 1791 and 1807 are examined and situated in the appropriate imperial context. Memoirs and published pamphlets reveal how contemporaries viewed Dundas's activities and motives at the time and since. His parliamentary activities are compared with new insights from his personal correspondence as well as public and private communications from West India societies, merchants and planters. By overlaying parliamentary events with commercial networks, Henry Dundas's collaboration with the West India interest is revealed, and how this operated and was perceived at the time. This article—the first detailed study of its type—thus illuminates Henry Dundas's role as a great delayer of the abolition of the slave trade.

Secret Key Generation From Vector Gaussian Sources With Public and Private Communications

In this paper, we consider the problem of secret key generation with one-way communication through both a rate-limited public channel and a rate-limited secure channels where the public channel is from Alice to Bob and Eve and the secure channel is from Alice to Bob. In this model, we do not pose any constraints on the sources, i.e. Bob is not degraded to or less noisy than Eve. We obtain the optimal secret key rate in this problem, both for the discrete memoryless sources and vector Gaussian sources. The vector Gaussian characterization is derived by suitably applying the enhancement argument, and proving a new extremal inequality. The extremal inequality can be seen as coupling of two extremal inequalities, which are related to the degraded compound MIMO Gaussian broadcast channel, and the vector generalization of Costa's entropy power inequality, accordingly.

A new efficient permutation-diffusion encryption algorithm based on a chaotic map

Nowadays, the internet is the main channel for private communication. The use of a public channel for private communications increases the importance of cryptography to protect the information. The most commonly shared archives are images, for which traditional algorithms are not suitable due to the file’s large size and algorithms’ high computational cost. In this scenario, chaos theory surges as a promising alternative for image encryption due to intrinsic features of chaos, leading to the development of many chaotic ciphers for image encryption. However, many of them are either insecure or ineffective, motivating us to present a new chaotic cipher that satisfies both of these requirements. To ensure peak performance, a comparison of chaotic maps is made to select the one most conductible to a high throughout, while architecture measures such as the use of the permutation-diffusion architecture and a hash function are taken to ensure security. Extensive tests applied show that the cipher is secure against various forms of attacks such as statistical, differential, noise, occlusion and chosen-plaintext, while the throughput analysis shows that our cipher compares favorably to other recently presented chaotic ciphers in literature.

A Qualitative Exploration of Addiction Disclosure and Stigma among Faculty Members in a Canadian University Context.

Addiction is one of the most stigmatized public health issues, which serves to silence individuals who need help. Despite emerging global interest in workplace mental health and addiction, scholarship examining addiction among university faculty members (FMs) is lacking, particularly in a Canadian context. Using a Communication Privacy Management (CPM) framework and semi-structured interviews with key informants (deans and campus mental health professionals), this qualitative study aimed to answer the following research questions: (1) What is the experience of key informants who encounter FM addiction? (2) How may addiction stigma affect FM disclosure and help-seeking? and (3) What may help reduce addiction stigma for FMs? Thematic analysis was used to identify three main themes: (1) Disclosure was rare, and most often involved alcohol; (2) Addiction stigma and non-disclosure were reported to be affected by university alcohol and productivity cultures, faculty type, and gender; (3) Reducing addiction stigma may involve peer support, vulnerable leadership (e.g., openly sharing addiction-recovery stories), and non-discriminatory protective policies. This study offers novel insights into how addiction stigma may operate for FMs in relation to university-specific norms (e.g., drinking and productivity culture), and outlines some recommendations for creating more recovery-friendly campuses.

Communication privacy management for smart speaker use: Integrating the role of privacy self-efficacy and the multidimensional view

Smart speakers can transform interactions with users into retrievable data, posing new challenges to privacy management. Privacy management in smart speakers can be more complex than just making decisions about disclosure based on the risk–benefit analysis. Hence, this study attempts to integrate privacy self-efficacy and the multidimensional view of privacy management behaviors into the privacy calculus model and proposes an extended privacy calculus model for smart speaker usage. The study explicates three types of privacy management strategies in smart speaker usage: privacy disclosure, boundary linkage, and boundary control. A survey of smart speaker users ( N = 474) finds that perceived benefits are positively associated with privacy disclosure and boundary linkage, whereas perceived privacy risks are negatively related to these two strategies. Also, perceived privacy risks are positively related to boundary control. Finally, privacy self-efficacy promotes all three strategies while mitigating the impact of perceived privacy risks and boosting the impact of perceived benefits on privacy management.

Публичное и приватное в профиле социальной сети (в свете теории С. Петронио)

A profile on a social network site (SNS) containing the user’s personal information qualifies as both a personal and public space, which raises the problem of delineating, what is private and what is public in this virtual domain. The paper attempts to identify privacy boundaries in the social media environment and the actual ownership of personal information disclosed on users’ profiles. The stated problem is considered through the lens of Communication Privacy Management theory, an influential approach to the study of privacy in the online environment proposed by Sandra Petronio. The terms and concepts of the theory are applied to analyze the peculiarities of privacy management of the user’s personal information on the pages of the social network VKontakte (i.e. in the context of ‘one-to-many’ communication). The peculiarities noted are as follows: the presence of social media administration as a co-owner of the data (i.e. the user is not granted exclusive ownership of their personal information); difficulties with discussing information ownership rules with other social media participants; the presence of such phenomena as ‘online friends’ and ‘the imagined audience’ making it difficult for the user to recognize the composition of their actual audience and set proper privacy boundaries. It is also shown that the social network provides what can only be described as rather vague collective privacy boundaries (if the term privacy is even applicable to the social media environment). All the information shared by the user on the social media profile crosses the personal privacy boundaries and is moved almost uncontrollably to the collective ownership domain. The further theoretical research of privacy management of personal information on social media profiles should aim to critically examine the concept of collective privacy in the digital space and determine the ownership rights of original owners of personal information gone public.

What to withhold and when to disclose: gender transitions and privacy management on social media

While digital resources are important in the development of gender and sexual identities and are often researched, I argue that transgender identities are distinct from other LGBTQ+ experiences and active strategies for managing digital gender transitions on social networks have not been subjected to qualitative inquiry. This study pairs communication privacy management alongside 131 transgender experiences to understand commonly utilized strategies of managing potentially vulnerable information (i.e., disclosure related to gender transitions) on social media. Findings suggest that disclosing information on social media related to gender transition compels transitioning individuals to consider the publicness of their account, the openness of their information sharing, and the type of information and content they share. These themes extend literature regarding transgender social support provision and online disclosures by depicting how transitioning publicly on social media can construct counterpublics and care structures, concepts usually linked to anonymous and closed online spaces.

The Constitutional System for the Protection of Privacy in Chilean Law

This article proposes a systemic review of the protection of privacy in the Chilean Constitution, understood not only by the norms of Article 19 No. 4, the right to privacy and the right to the protection of personal data, but also through the normative content provided by No. 5, which comprises the rights to the inviolability of the home, private communications and documents, subject to constitutional protection. When we conceive the privacy protection standards set out in Chilean constitutional law as a system, we can appreciate that despite the obvious differences between the different rights that form this system, there are areas where they do intersect or overlap when applying them to specific facts. This wide scope of protection is essential to apply the right to privacy as a strong defence against the threats and risks posed by the use of digital technologies. Chile, Privacy, Constitutional Law, Personal Data, Private Communications, Informational Self-Determination

Mexico (Non-)Adequacy to European Standards on Personal Data Protection in the Context of Employment

This article analyses the main standards and regulations put in place by the European Union (EU) and the Council of Europe with respect to the privacy and personal data protection of workers. It demonstrates that there is a current tendency toward the establishment of specific rules aimed at strengthening employees’ rights vis-à-vis employers’ interests. It also shows that there is a preventive rather than a reactive approach in the European model. However, this article argues that, albeit strongly influenced by Europe, the Mexican legal framework on personal data protection does not follow this trend, due to legislative asymmetries between the public and private sector, as well as the lack of specific regulation in this field. Chile, Privacy, Constitutional Law, Personal Data, Private Communications, Informational Self-Determination