Annotated Bibliography Companion to:


“How Privacy’s Past May Shape its Future:

An Account of Privacy’s Evolutionary Roots May
Hold Lessons for Policies in The Digital Age

 

By Alessandro Acquisti1, Laura Brandimarte2, Jeff Hancock3

 

Published in Science, Friday January 21, 2022

 

1Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA USA. 2Eller College of Management, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ USA. 3Department of Communications, Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA.
Email:
acquisti@andrew.cmu.edu.

 

This unrefereed companion document provides an extended, annotated bibliography of additional scholarly works related to arguments presented in the manuscript, as well as a few additional footnotes. The references and footnotes are presented in the order in which they would appear in the main body of the manuscript.

-        Acknowledgements: we are very grateful for comments provided by the reviewers, as well as by J. Bailenson, E. Carbone, D. Chang, N. Christin, J. Colnago, M. Culnan, J. Flagg, J. Graves, J. Grossklags, C. Hoofnagle, L. Jiang, L. John, T. Libert, G. Loewenstein, V. Marotta, M. Rotenberg, S. Samat, F. Schaub, E. Schnadower Mustri, P. Shah, J. Spiegel, R. Steed, L. Warberg, and by participants at several workshops (including PLSC 2013, SHB 2014, and WEIS 2015) and seminars. We gratefully acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation through Awards 1228857 (Evolutionary Approaches to Privacy and Information Security, 2012) and 1514192 (Understanding and Exploiting Visceral Roots of Privacy and Security Concerns, 2015).

-        On the notion that privacy may be a modern invention or a modern anomaly: see V. Cerf, Speech at the Federal Trade Commission Internet of Things Workshop, Washington, D.C., 19 November 2013 (https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_events/internet-things-privacy-security-connected-world/final_transcript.pdf).

-        For numerous evidences of privacy norms and needs across cultures throughout human history and across geography (unlike privacy rights or privacy as a value – which are more modern notions), as well as for evidence of their heterogeneity across those cultures, see, among others: A. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (Simon & Schuster, 1967); I. Altman, Privacy regulation: Culturally universal or culturally specific? Journal of Social Issues. 33(3), 66-84 (1977); P.H. Klopfer, D.I. Rubenstein, The concept privacy and its biological basis. Journal of Social Issues, 33(3), 52–65 (1977); B. Moore Jr, Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History: Studies in Social and Cultural History (Sharpe, 1984); R.F. Hixson, Privacy in a Public Society (Oxford University Press 1987); D. Vincent, Privacy: A Short History (Polity Press, 2016) – and the numerous studies and scholars cited therein (such as, for instance, Murphy, Robert F. "Social Distance and the Veil 1." American Anthropologist 66(6), 1257-1274 (1964); T.A. Gregor, Exposure and seclusion: A study of institutionalized isolation among the Mehinacu Indians of Brazil. Ethnology, 9, 234-250 (1970); P. Aries, G. Duby, A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium. (Belknap Press, 1987), Vol. 1; Shaw, Diane. "The construction of the private in medieval London." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (1996), and so forth). For instance, Professor Hixson (1987) writes (p. 3) “Privacy, in practice as well as in concept, has long been a central part of mankind’s history” (and then proceeds by using examples from the Genesis, among other sources). Professor Moore (1984) writes (p. ix) “At the outset I took seriously the possibility that in some societies there might be nothing at all that corresponded to our conception of private. As the reader will see, there are some societies where that is very nearly the case,” and then concludes (p. x): “[N]early all of [this book] is about societies remote in time and space from our own. To the extent that these studies may make any contribution to understanding contemporary aspects of privacy and privacy rights, it is by setting them in a wider context, indicating the range of variation in privacy concerns and providing evidence about their early history.” Professor Veyne (in Aries and Duby (1987), pp. 72-73) discusses how, even in Roman families never left alone by their slaves, “[t]he lady slept alone, but she had a slave, or several slaves, close to her bed. More commonly, slaves slept at the door to the master’s bedchamber, over which they stood guard. […] When the master or mistress wished to spend an evening alone, they had the slaves move their cots to some remote corner of the house.” Social historian David Vincent writes (p. 1): “These disputes […] challenge the frequent assumption that privacy did not emerge as an aspiration until the seventeenth century and was not a reality for the mass of the population for at least a further two centuries” (referring to disputes between neighbors in medieval London, with complaints of one opening windows from which they could watch the private affairs of the other, the plaintiff). Professor Vincent also notes that the public/private boundary is “invisible” to some observers because “they are looking for the wrong situation,” due to the fact that “during the modern era an individualistic conception of privacy has gained traction” (the ancient roots of privacy may be similarly invisible to those who construe privacy merely in informational/data terms.) Professor Diane Shaw (1996) writes: “The mistaken assertion that the notion of physical privacy was absent in medieval society perhaps derives from the modern assumption that privacy is individual and absolute, rather than communal and relative.” And so forth.

-        On evolutionary adaptation developing more sophisticated forms of social cognition, balancing the tensions between individual freedom and collective welfare: see S.L. Neuberg, M. Schaller, Evolutionary social cognition. M. Mikulincer, P. R. Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh Eds., (APA Handbook of personality and social psychology, Vol. 1. Attitudes and social cognition), pp. 3–45. (American Psychological Association, 2015).

-        On the evolution of reputation and impression management, see B.R. Schlenker, Impression Management: The Self-Concept, Social Identity, and Interpersonal Relations (Brooks-Cole, Monterey, CA, 1980).

-        On the selection information about oneself to make favorable impressions on others, see R.F. Baumeister, M.R. Leary, The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin. 117(3), 497 (1995).

-        On reticence and withdrawal as instruments of impression management: see E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (London: Harmondsworth 1978).

-        On a line connecting the seemingly diverse manifestations of privacy across human history (privacy as the selective, self-interested opening and closing of the self to others): see, in addition to I. Altman, Privacy regulation: Culturally universal or culturally specific? Journal of Social Issues. 33(3), 66-84 (1977), also: I. Altman, The Environment and Social Behavior: Privacy, Personal Space, Territory, and Crowding. (Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Monterey, CA, 1975).

-        On the dialectic between opening and closing being a universal characteristic of the human species—an eternal tension between a “desire for seclusion” and a “need to depend on others”, see R.F. Hixson, Privacy in a Public Society (Oxford University Press 1987), p. 5.

-        On the diversity in dimensions, definitions, and norms of privacy over time and across the literature, see D.J. Solove, A taxonomy of privacy. University of Pennsylvania Law Review. 154(3), 477-560 (2005).

-        On hiding behavior in cats, see K. Kry, R. Casey, The effect of hiding enrichment on stress levels and behaviour of domestic cats (Felis sylvestris catus) in a shelter setting and the implications for adoption potential. Animal Welfare, 16(3), pp. 375-383 (2007).

-        On chimps lower in the social hierarchy concealing mating activities or a coveted source of food from higher-status males: see F. De Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes (JHU Press, 2007), and in particular pp. 36-37 and p. 62. Two fascinating episodes involving chimpanzees engaging in “concealment” behavior are described in Professor de Waal’s book: “Dandy [a young, lower ranking male chimpanzee in a chimpanzee enclosure] began to make advances to the female, while at the same time restlessly looking around to see if any of the other males were watching.” When Luit, one of the older and higher-status males, unexpectedly came around the corner, “Dandy immediately dropped his hands over his penis concealing it from view.” (p. 36-37 of the 25th anniversary edition). Separately, after researchers hid grapefruit in the chimpanzee enclosure as part of an experiment, Dandy was able to find the hidden spot. However, when “[a] number of apes passed the place where the grapefruits were hidden, [...] Dandy too had passed over the hiding place without stopping or slowing down at all and without showing any undue interest.” The same afternoon he went back to the spot and “[w]ithout hesitation he dug up the grapefruits and devoured them at leisure. Had Dandy not kept the location of the place a secret, he would probably have lost the grapefruits to the others.” (p. 62). Also, see Andelman (1987) on various hypotheses of evolutionary advantages of concealment behavior in animals (and specifically concealed ovulation in nonhuman primates: Andelman, Sandy J. Evolution of concealed ovulation in vervet monkeys (Cercopithecus aethiops). The American Naturalist, 129(6), 785-799 (1987)). Klopfer and Rubenstein (1977, p. 64) conclude: “In sum, there are innumerable instances of nonhuman animals acting in a manner that characterizes humans seeking privacy.” A very similar conclusion is found in Westin (1967, Chapter 1).

-        Concerning a sense of privacy in humans, notwithstanding the variation of privacy norms: see, on the notion that traits can be innate without being unchangeable, J. Haidt, The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage, 2012, and G.F. Marcus, The birth of the mind: How a tiny number of genes creates the complexities of human thought. Basic Civitas Books, 2004. Innate but not unchangeable traits, together with the influence of culture and norms, may explain the process through which children develop, as they age, a sense of privacy. Haidt (2005, Chapter 7) cites Marcus (2004), and writes: “If you proposed that anything more complex than that was innate—particularly a sex difference—you’d be told that there was a tribe somewhere on Earth that didn’t show the trait, so therefore it’s not innate. We’ve advanced a lot since the 1970s in our understanding of the brain, and now we know that traits can be innate without being either hardwired or universal. As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, ‘Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.’ To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter— be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality— consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. Marcus’s analogy leads to the best definition of innateness I have ever seen: ‘Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… ‘Built-in’ does not mean unmalleable; it means ‘organized in advance of experience.’”

-        On how sensorial (including visual) cues indicating that other humans are present may still influence today how we define the boundaries between public and private: recent work has observed the power of visual cues in young children’s conceptualizations of privacy risks with technology. Where visual cues are present, children have much more accurate understanding of how a technology works (for instance, why they see content recommendations), whereas they have no sense that data is flowing back to companies when visual cues are lacking. See K. Sun, C. Sugatan, T. Afnan, H. Simon, S. Gelman, J. Radesky, F. Schaub, “They See You’re a Girl if You Pick a Pink Robot with a Skirt”: A Qualitative Study of How Children Conceptualize Data Processing and Digital Privacy Risks. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, Virtual, May 2021.

-        On so-called dark patterns, see G. Conti, E. Sobiesk, Malicious interface design: exploiting the user. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on World Wide Web, Raleigh, NC, April 2010 and A. Acquisti, I. Adjerid, R. Balebako, L. Brandimarte, L.F. Cranor, S. Komanduri, P.G. Leon, N. Sadeh, F. Schaub, M. Sleeper, Y. Wang, S. Wilson, Nudges for privacy and security: Understanding and assisting users’ choices online. ACM Computing Surveys. 50(3), 1-41 (2017).

-        We proposed a privacy evolutionary gap conjecture originally in A. Acquisti, L. Brandimarte, J.T. Hancock, Are There Evolutionary Roots To Privacy Concerns? Privacy Law Scholars Conference, Berkeley, CA, 2013 and in A. Acquisti, L. Brandimarte, J.T. Hancock, Online Self-Disclosure and Offline Threat Detection. Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, Delft, The Netherlands, 2015, as well as in NSF proposals 1228857 (Evolutionary Approaches to Privacy and Information Security, 2012) and 1514192 (Understanding and Exploiting Visceral Roots of Privacy and Security Concerns, 2015).

-        On other evolutionary mismatches of modernity, such as the modern diet’s mismatch with our ancestral history: see J.E. Riggs, Stone-age genes and modern lifestyle: evolutionary mismatch or differential survival bias. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. 46(11), 1289-1291 (1993) and A.C. Logan, F.N. Jacka, Nutritional Psychiatry Research: An Emerging Discipline and Its Intersection With Global Urbanization, Environmental Challenges And The Evolutionary Mismatch. Journal of Physiological Anthropology. 33(1), 1-16 (2014).

-        On privacy externalities, also see A. Acquisti, C.R. Taylor, L. Wagman, Liad, The Economics of Privacy. Journal of Economic Literature. 52(2), 442-492 (2016).

-        On filter bubbles, amplification of disinformation, political polarization, implications for democratic elections, see: E. Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (Penguin, 2011); S. Vosoughi, D. Roy, S. Aral. The spread of true and false news online. Science. 359(6380), 1146-1151 (2018); C.A. Bail, L.P. Argyle, T.W. Brown, J.P. Bumpus, H. Chen, M.F. Hunzaker, J. Lee, M. Mann, F. Merhout, A. Volfovsky. Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 115(37), 9216-9221 (2018); R.E. Levy, Social media, news consumption, and polarization: Evidence from a field experiment. American Economic Review. 111(3), 831-70 (2021); S. Aral, D. Eckles, Protecting elections from social media manipulation. Science. 365(6456), 858-861 (2019).

-        On doxxing, see: S. Eckert, J. Metzger‐Riftkin, Doxxing. K. Ross, I. Bachmann, V. Cardo, S. Moorti & M. Scarcelli Eds., (The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication). (Wiley, 2020).

-        On an overreliance on notice and consent mechanisms being ineffectual and possibly backfiring, see D.J. Solove, Introduction: Privacy self-management and the consent dilemma. Harvard Law Review. 126, 1880-1903 (2012) and L. Brandimarte, A. Acquisti, G. Loewenstein, Misplaced confidences: Privacy and the control paradox. Social Psychological and Personality Science. 4(3), 340-347 (2013).

-        On citizens “responsibilization”, see M. Giesler, E. Veresiu, Creating the responsible consumer: Moralistic governance regimes and consumer subjectivity. Journal of Consumer Research. 41(3), 840-857 (2014).

-        On the proliferation of manipulative interfaces and implied consent mechanisms under the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU, also see (in addition to Utz et al, 2019): M. Nouwens, I. Liccardi, M. Veale, D. Karger, L. Kagal, Dark patterns after the GDPR: Scraping consent pop-ups and demonstrating their influence. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Honolulu, HI, April 2020. 

-        On much of our privacy behavior being intuitive and visceral: see R. Calo, Against notice skepticism in privacy (and elsewhere). Notre Dame Law Review. 87(3), 1027-1072 (2011).

-        For examples of individuals’ personal information being collected across too many instances and vectors for our bounded cognitive resources to manage efficiently or effectively, see H. Almuhimedi, F. Schaub, N. Sadeh, I. Adjerid, A. Acquisti, J. Gluck, L. Cranor, Y. Agarwal, Your location has been shared 5,398 times!: A field study on mobile app privacy nudging. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2015

-        On humans tuning out even visible signs of electronic surveillance, see: A. Oulasvirta, A. Pihlajamaa, J. Perkiö, D. Ray, T. Vähäkangas, T. Hasu, N. Vainio,  P. Myllymäki, Long-term effects of ubiquitous surveillance in the home. Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, Pittsburgh, PA, September 2012.

-        On an evolutionary mechanism of explanation not necessarily demanding an evolutionary mechanism of change: we thank Professor Neil Anthony Lewis for the formulation (personal communication).

-        On data propertization schemes from economics: see K.C. Laudon, Markets and privacy. Communications of the ACM. 39(9), 92-104 (1996), who originally proposed the creation of markets for personal data. Also see related more recent work in I. Arrieta-Ibarra, L. Goff, D. Jiménez-Hernández, J. Lanier, E.G. Weyl, Should we treat data as labor? Moving beyond" free". AEA Papers and Proceedings. 108 38-42 (2018).

-        On nudges from behavioral research, see, again, A. Acquisti, I. Adjerid, R. Balebako, L. Brandimarte, L.F. Cranor, S. Komanduri, P.G. Leon, N. Sadeh, F. Schaub, M. Sleeper, Y. Wang, S. Wilson, Nudges for privacy and security: Understanding and assisting users’ choices online. ACM Computing Surveys. 50(3), 1-41 (2017).

-        On simplified notices from usability research, see P.G. Kelley, J. Bresee, L.F. Cranor, R.W. Reeder, A "nutrition label" for privacy, Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security, Mountain View, CA, July 2009.

-        On better safety in cars being the result of deliberate policy intervention (driving investment in technical and infrastructural changes), not merely of driver education or market forces, see M.R. Lemov, Car Safety Wars: One Hundred Years of Technology, Politics, and Death (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). 

-        On baseline safeguards embedded in the OECD’s Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, see Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), “OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data”, (1980; revised in 2013; http://www.oecd.org/sti/ieconomy/oecdguidelinesontheprotectionofprivacyandtransborderflowsofpersonaldata.htm).

-        On protocols (from differential privacy to homomorphic encryption to federated learning) pointing at the possibility of protecting individuals’ privacy while allowing beneficial analytics to advance, see R. Mendes, J.P. Vilela, Privacy-preserving data mining: methods, metrics, and applications. IEEE Access, 5, 10562-10582 (2017).

-        On tools from AI and machine learning deployed in privacy assistants, see: A. Das, M. Degeling, D. Smullen, N. Sadeh, Personalized Privacy Assistants for The Internet of Things: Providing Users With Notice and Choice. IEEE Pervasive Computing. 17(3), 35-46 (2018) and A. Grotto, R.E. Guadagno, J.T. Hancock, H. Mieczkowski, Applying the Principal-Agent Framework to AI-Mediated Communication: Psychological Implications, AAAI-21 Workshop on AI For Behavior Change, Palo Alto, CA, February 2021.

-        On privacy by design, see A. Cavoukian, Privacy by Design. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. 31(4), 18-19 (2012).

-        On economic research suggesting that data protection is not inherently welfare-decreasing, see: A. Acquisti, C.R. Taylor, L. Wagman, Liad, The Economics of Privacy. Journal of Economic Literature. 52(2), 442-492 (2016).

-        On the use of differentially private algorithms to achieve the dual goal of producing accurate statistics while protecting individuals’ privacy, see: J.M. Abowd, I.M. Schmutte, An Economic Analysis of Privacy Protection and Statistical Accuracy as Social Choices. American Economic Review. 109(1), 171-202 (2019).

-        Regarding the incentives (or lack thereof) for industry players to adopt privacy preserving technologies, consider the debate around AI and data-driven algorithmic personalization: “Facebook leadership has also repeatedly weakened or halted many initiatives meant to clean up misinformation on the platform because doing so would undermine that growth” (K. Hao, How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation, MIT Technology Review, (2021; https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation)). Also, consider Apple’s 2021 roll out of an App Tracking Transparency (ATT) system, which allows individuals to opt out of being tracked by apps on their phone, and the backlash it has received from the advertising industry (K. Wagner. “Facebook Users Said No to Tracking. Now Advertisers are Panicking”. Bloomberg Technology, Bloomberg, (July 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-14/facebook-fb-advertisers-impacted-by-apple-aapl-privacy-ios-14-changes)).

-        On privacy legal scholarship expanding the notion of privacy protection from mere control over data flows to encompass issues of autonomy and protection from bias: see K. Mulligan, C. Koopman, N. Doty, Privacy is an Essentially Contested Concept: A Multi-Dimensional Analytic for Mapping Privacy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences. 374(2083), 1-17 (2016).

-        On novel legal approaches, such as construing data holders as data “fiduciaries” who hold legal obligations to act in the best interests of their customers, see: J.M. Balkin, Information Fiduciaries and the First Amendment. University California, Davis Law Review. 49, 1185-1232 (2015). Also see a recent working paper by Professor Solove: D. Solove, The Limitations of Privacy Rights, George Washington University Law School, January 2022.

-        On humans attempting to carve out private spaces even when odds are stacked against them by surveillance, be it digital or physical, see examples in D. Boyd, A.E. Marwick, Social privacy in networked publics: Teens’ attitudes, practices, and strategies. A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society. University of Oxford, September 2011 and P. Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in The German Democratic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2010).