Research articles on PRIVACY & SECURITY

The 'Facebook online social experiment' has caused much controversy. Researchers Cornelius Puschmann and Engin Bozdag review the debate around research ethics and come to the conclusion that "benefits for science should be balanced with possible hazards that may be caused by experiments, rather than precluding that such benefits outweigh the gains".

A new Danish study calls into question a cornerstone of the data protection regime in Europe: user consent. This article discusses the findings in light of the concept of 'privacy as a human right'.

A review of the recent economic literature aimed at empirically assessing internet users’ valuation of their personal data, suggesting possible limitations and pitfalls in the experiments, and drawing policy-oriented remarks focused on data portability.

Drawing on the example of the US surveillance operation PRISM and its impact on European citizens’ right to privacy, the author discusses what an authoritative human rights-based response could look like.

If you do not see a policeman outside of your door, you are looking out of the wrong window. Read this scholarly essay as an analogy of privacy violations.

Civil disobedience is a familiar and well established phenomenon in Western societies. Currently, this concept of political action is challenged by new practices evolving on and around the internet. This paper focusses on the question of whether several forms of digital civil disobedience are legitimate.

Currently dominant cloud services raise challenges in terms of security, privacy and user autonomy. Decentralisation, advocated by civil society, may overcome some of the drawbacks.

European countries' welfare increasingly depends on the services of the information society. This comes along with a price tag: continued increase of the cyber threat spectrum. Despite the need for coordinated efforts in cyber security, Europe lacks of common understanding.

The American aversion to big government is matched by the German aversion to big data. How to best reconcile the two privacy cultures, is the subject of this analysis.

There are significant dangers in surveilling online communications unless the mechanisms and policies of surveillance are subject to strict and legally enforceable standards of transparency, oversight, and control.