privacy risk
Privacy risk refers to the potential for harm to individuals or organizations resulting from the unauthorized access, use, disclosure, or loss of personal data. In the context of digital health and surveillance technologies, it involves balancing individual rights against collective security or public health benefits.
Key Dynamics
- Risk-Risk Tradeoff: A framework where users weigh the immediate health risks of a pandemic against the long-term privacy risks of data collection Duc Tran - Health vs. privacy The risk-risk tradeoff in using COVID-19.
- Function Creep: The risk that data collected for specific purposes (e.g., contact-tracing) may later be used for unrelated surveillance or profiling.
- Data Minimization: The principle that only data strictly necessary for the intended purpose should be collected to mitigate exposure.
Context: COVID-19 Contact Tracing
Research indicates that public acceptance of contact-tracing apps depends heavily on the perceived balance between efficacy and intrusion.
- Empirical Findings: Tran et al. (2021) utilized fsQCA to analyze the risk-risk-tradeoff, finding that health risk perception often overrides privacy concerns during peak pandemic intensity, but privacy risks remain a critical determinant for long-term adoption Duc Tran - Health vs. privacy The risk-risk tradeoff in using COVID-19.
- Technical Architecture: Centralized systems pose higher privacy risk due to single points of failure and data aggregation, whereas decentralized models mitigate this by keeping data on local devices.
Related Concepts
- data-sovereignty
- Surveillance Capitalism
- Informed Consent
- gdpr