Privacy in the Making

Privacy in the Making is a multidisciplinary group of researchers within the professional fields of social sciences, law and IT. The multidisciplinary structure is a main attribute of of the group and efforts are made to develop combined and shared models for the study of privacy protection. This is primarily done via collaboration with a range of projects in which privacy issues surface, either directly or indirectly. A synthesis of the experiences of these collaborations are then used as a foundation for theories about privacy formation, methods for privacy-aware design of IT, regulatory mechanisms for privacy protection, etc. 

The privacy protection issues under study range from concerns caused by particular privacy sensitive technical equipment (tools to be used for eye gaze tracking and RFID technology, for example) to studies of people’s attitudes and the mindscapes relevant in the privacy context. In other words, the various research activities give examples of both hard and soft orientations. The legal issues are correspondingly complex and involve not only traditional and formal analyses of existing regulation but also, for example, issues of alternative ways of dealing with risks of infringement. The latter presupposes both practical studies of such risks and efforts to develop standardized tools to deal with them (ways of creating intimacy on networked meeting places, for example).