Tuesday 9 July 2013

Security, privacy and surveillance in European policy documents


I have a new article out now in International Data Privacy Law. The article is part of the work on PRISMS (no, not that one, rather the EU funded study into security, privacy and surveillance), which you can also find in this report. All the authors of that report should be acknowledged in this article too (and I sincerely hope that they are in the article text).

Here's the abstract for the article, which if you have access, you can get here

  • Through an examination of security and privacy policy documents from the EU, selected European states and the USA, this article examines problem construction and policy making in the interrelated fields of security, privacy, and surveillance.
  • This horizontal analysis, across a set of documents, provides insights into the way these topics are viewed within the policy-making process.
  • The analysis also shows the development of EU governmentality around security and privacy, and indicates that whilst the policy discourse of security and privacy is not homogeneous, the influence of European-level governance on security and privacy practices is significant.
  • The study aims to make a contribution to the literature on security and privacy and on the international context for policy making. 





Friday 5 July 2013

New publication: Playing with Privacy: Games for Education and Communication in the Politics of Online Privacy

Cover image for Vol. 61 Issue 2 
The article based upon the Privacy card game research has just been made available for early online viewing in the journal Political Studies. I'm really pleased to see this published, and I'm looking forward to seeing the printed version.

There's a little bit more information (and some photos) of the game under the 'Privacy Game' header at the top of the page, but this article really goes into depth on the theoretical motivations for getting involved in making a card game, the particular problematic politics of online privacy, the use of games for education and communication, and the results of the fairly extensive evaluation work we did on the game. 

I'm also glad this is in a mainstream politics journal, as I hope it makes the case for more of this time of research in those areas (as well as drawing attention to the politics of online privacy, which sometimes gets overlooked in Political Science). 

It's behind a paywall I'm afraid. I'll try and make a pre-print version available when I can.