Privacy Salience: Taxonomies and Research Opportunities
This work addresses the challenge of making privacy more salient for individuals in digital contexts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing studies without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of privacy salience being less tangible in digital environments compared to the physical world by constructing the first taxonomies of privacy salience through a survey of existing studies, categorizing works by methodologies, platforms, and themes to identify overlooked research opportunities such as targeted advertising in social networks.
Privacy is a well-understood concept in the physical world, with us all desiring some escape from the public gaze. However, while individuals might recognise locking doors as protecting privacy, they have difficulty practising equivalent actions online. Privacy salience considers the tangibility of this important principle; one which is often obscured in digital environments. Through extensively surveying a range of studies, we construct the first taxonomies of privacy salience. After coding articles and identifying commonalities, we categorise works by their methodologies, platforms and underlying themes. While web browsing appears to be frequently analysed, the Internet-of-Things has received little attention. Through our use of category tuples and frequency matrices, we then explore those research opportunities which might have been overlooked. These include studies of targeted advertising and its affect on salience in social networks. It is through refining our understanding of this important topic that we can better highlight the subject of privacy.