Understanding Privacy as a Multilevel Concept

How do privacy-invasive business practices and technologies gain societal acceptance? To what extent are the associated legitimization processes reflected in the media?

Factsheet

Situation

In an increasingly digitized world, data is becoming an ever more important resource. However, creating value from data can also affect the individuals’ privacy. Although privacy-invasive business practices and technologies are considered socially controversial, they are still widespread. Against this backdrop, it is questionable how these practices and technologies gain legitimacy and how this is reflected in societal discourse.

Course of action

In the context of the project, large amounts of media data are analyzed (e.g., newspaper articles and content on social media). State-of-the-art machine learning approaches and large language models (LLM) are used to examine legitimization processes as they become visible in the media data.

Result

The novel text-based metrics and analytical procedures developed in the project open up the possibility of generating valuable insights regarding the legitimation of privacy-invasive business practices and technologies through automated media analyses.