The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 sparked a global regulatory debate over privacy, exposing gaps in conceptualizations of privacy between users, industry, and policymakers. This study leverages the ensuing parliamentary hearings in the US and the EU in order to examine the heterogeneity of privacy frames among elite actors. Using a validated coding scheme, we systematically analyze 593 interventions by lawmakers and witnesses, capturing privacy-specific attributes such as its vertical and horizontal orientations, proximity of privacy relations, and responsibility for privacy infringement and protection. Our preliminary findings reveal an overall dominance of vertical privacy framing in the hearings, which stands in contrast with earlier findings about horizontal framing among users. We also observe differences in privacy framing between the industry and the lawmakers, and between conservative and liberal parliamentarians. Our study contributes to the literature on privacy conceptualization and framing, highlighting the dimensionalization, the gaps, and the politics of privacy in policy deliberations. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study and activism surrounding privacy as a pivotal democratic issue in surveillance capitalism.

Privacy settings are a critical mechanism for platforms to manage, control, and impact user privacy online. The policies of social media platforms and their technical design—including the choice architecture of privacy settings—"serve as a form of privatized governance directly enacting rights and regulating the flow of information online (DeNardis & Hackl, 2015). Many platforms use a rhetoric of “choice and control,” relying on privacy settings to shoulder the burden of responsibility for user privacy (Horne, 2021). Another challenge to privacy on social media platforms is that there is a wide disparity of settings choices across different platforms, with varying defaults (Horne, 2023). Additionally, the interconnection and the technical importance of privacy settings has a clear and well-established history. This paper examines this history via a historical analysis of Meta’s changes to privacy settings. The analysis focuses on Meta as it is one of the oldest and largest of social media platforms; it also hosts a comprehensive archive of news articles, which tracks critical updates to Meta products. The study seeks to determine what privacy settings changes Meta has made, when the changes were announced, as well as analyze how these changes were framed in news articles.

Digital traces generated by internet users are automatically collected, stored, and analyzed by public and private actors. This dataveillance becomes salient to users through repeated exposure over time to triggers of a sense of dataveillance. This can lead to a range of consequences including democratically concerning responses such as the self-inhibition of legitimate digital communication behavior, known as the chilling effects of dataveillance. Such chilling effects are expected to subtly accumulate over time. Hence, longitudinal in-situ studies are required to capture the temporal dynamics of individuals’ perception of dataveillance and the resulting behavioral changes. Relying on a longitudinal online field experiment with a representative sample of Swiss internet users, this study investigates how chilling effects accumulate over time and aims to capture the temporal dynamics of chilling effects. Preliminary results reveal that the experimental treatment successfully heightened participants' sense of dataveillance over time. Time significantly predicted this increase, aligning with the notion of accumulating chilling effects. Furthermore, the comfort levels of the digital communication behaviors, including information searching, opinion voicing, and information disclosing, were over time lower for the experimental treatment than control condition, supporting the chilling-effects hypothesis. Accumulating chilling effects were found for information disclosing as the experimental treatment and time predicted a decrease in participants’ comfortability level. This article provides an innovative contribution to the growing research on the chilling effects of dataveillance and adds to the empirical understanding of the nature of chilling effects.

This study examines the apparent paradox of hackers engaging in both invading and safeguarding privacy. Drawing on digital materialism, which posits that code holds a material presence and cultural significance beyond its functional role, the research aims to illuminate the hackers' ethical dilemmas embedded in privacy code. To gain insight into the cultural logic behind this seeming contrast, we conducted qualitative content and code analyses on both malicious and non-malicious code projects from the open-source platform GitHub. We have narrowed down a list of 2500 hackers to 52 who own both malicious and non-malicious projects, with a reference to privacy. We found that these hackers justify their malicious projects as educational tools, often cautioning other users against illegal use. The hackers' logic asserts that those possessing private information are responsible for its protection, be it the end-user or the software owner managing the information post-collection. This logic is translated into code using two privacy approaches: a formal privacy-by-policy and a technically-oriented privacy-by-design. The hackers' polar approach to privacy materializes both in violating privacy when crafting breaching code and in writing code that expertly protects it. From this individualized, privatized standpoint, this duality makes perfect sense.