The Kaleidoscope of Privacy: Differences across French, German, UK, and US GDPR Media Discourse
This research highlights regional differences in privacy discourse, which could pose obstacles to implementing unilateral data protection regulations like GDPR, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to new data.
The study analyzed media coverage of GDPR in French, German, UK, and US sources over two years using topic modeling, finding that topics and trends reflect differences in traditional privacy cultures across these regions.
Conceptions of privacy differ by culture. In the Internet age, digital tools continuously challenge the way users, technologists, and governments define, value, and protect privacy. National and supranational entities attempt to regulate privacy and protect data managed online. The European Union passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which took effect on 25 May 2018. The research presented here draws on two years of media reporting on GDPR from French, German, UK, and US sources. We use the unsupervised machine learning method of topic modelling to compare the thematic structure of the news articles across time and geographic regions. Our work emphasises the relevance of regional differences regarding valuations of privacy and potential obstacles to the implementation of unilateral data protection regulation such as GDPR. We find that the topics and trends over time in GDPR media coverage of the four countries reflect the differences found across their traditional privacy cultures.