Surveillance and privacy as coevolving disruptions: reflections on “notice and choice”

Abstract

The last two decades have seen a dramatic rise in the ways governments, private industry, and other interests can access, gather, analyze, and employ information about citizens. Given the unique roles of practitioners from both the public and private sectors in this policy ecosystem, we lay conceptual groundwork for coevolving technological, business, and policy disruptions. We focus on the “notice and choice” framework (which we consider a type of nudge) given changing conceptions of privacy in a world of evolving norms. Finally, we consider the difficult problem of clear guideposts for policy actors as they try to reconcile public demands for privacy with competing interests.

Keywords:

• Privacy
• data collection
• surveillance
• governance
• public opinion
• nudging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).