Privacy-by-Norms Privacy Expectations in Online Interactions

In an increasingly instrumented and inter-connected digital world, citizens generate vast amounts of data, much of it personal, and nearly all of it valuable. However, controlling who can collect it, limiting what they can do with it, and determining how best to protect it, remain deeply undecided issues. This position paper proposes a socio-technical solution based on collective awareness and informed consent, whereby data collection and data protection norms are configured by the users themselves, using a collaborative participatory process of argumentation. This refers to the ability of users to understand privacy-related documents and their implications via participatory processes, wisdom-of-the-crowds approaches and visual cues. By strengthening the trust bond between service developers and users, the transformative impact of this solution, called Privacy-by-Norms (Pb Norms), will be to encourage innovation and to ensure that (big) data's (tiny) generators are also its beneficiaries. Pb Norms will aim to complement existing top-down solutions to data protection that rely on technical or legal provisions. The goal is to enable citizens to express their privacy expectations through the use of mature ICT technologies from the fields of Computational Argumentation and the Semantic Web.