The goal hear is to provide a birds-eye view of the research around privacy - from social sciences to computer science, because privacy that’s the nature of privacy.
Often-times researchers in anthropology studying privacy are very unaware of what researches in computer science are doing and it massively helpful to establish communication channels. So we provide here a map to knowing what’s out there. If you know of another research field that studies privacy or can expand a particular one, feed free to edit edit this wiki page
Privacy-enhancing technologies
This is the computer-science approach to privacy.
This is an attempt at breaking down this field, but there may be other categories
- anonymous routing - tor and censorship resistance
- Transparency enhancing tools (TETs)
- Differential Privacy
- Anonymous Credentials
- Traffic Analysis
- PETs and Usability
- Private information retrieval
- Location Privacy
- Homomorphic Encryption
- Bitcoin/Blockchain
- Privacy by Design
- Zero-knowledge proofs
- Usage control
- Anonymity/de-anonymization
- Electronic Voting
Surveillance Studies
This is an area within anthropology where you study the nature of surveillance. A lot of change is being detected by anthropologists but we often-times don’t hear about it.
The following document by the researcher Gary T. Marx is quite a good intro to the subject.
There is a course in ISCTE (Lisbon) about this from professor Pedro Neto appropriately named The Future of Freedom: Surveillance, Censorship and Identification (you can enroll in the course individually).
Gary T. Marx also made a book summarizing the research area here or just watch the online presentation (warning: youtube)
Education Research
A whole lot of research has also been done about the impact of surveillance in education. This might be related to “Surveillance Studies” but I have a hunch that the reseacher who investigate this come from the education background.
Find papers about this by searching ERIC with privacy-related tags like surveillance or privacy.
Here there are at least two research areas:
- Impact of surveillance in education
- Education about digital security
Finding other research fields
These are the ones I’m aware of but here are some hints of places to look in
- Human Rights Law
- Country-specific Law
- Fairness Accountability and Transparency