Navigating privacy research

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:

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
1 Like

Feed free to contribute to the above wiki page by clicking on the button on the top right corner EDIT THIS WIKI PAGE.

Added another research field:

May be relevant