[AISWorld] ISJ Special Issue on Reframing Privacy in a Networked World

[Heng Xu]

Information Systems Journal (ISJ) Special Issue on Reframing Privacy in a Networked World

Special Issue Coordinating Editor-in-Chief
Eileen M. Trauth (The Pennsylvania State University) -etrauth at ist.psu.edu

Special Issue Guest Editors
Heng Xu (The Pennsylvania State University) -hxu at ist.psu.edu
France Bélanger (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) -belanger at vt.edu

Call: Empirical and conceptual research addressing the need for a paradigm shift in understanding privacy in today’s networked world

Submission Deadline: January 15, 2014

Motivation: As huge amounts of diverse information about individuals become available in online electronic form, privacy is an ever-present and mounting concern among multiple stakeholders including business leaders, privacy activists, scholars, government regulators, and consumers.  For example, social media brought the voluntary disclosure of personal data to the mainstream, thus making privacy concerns particularly salient in recent years. The extensive display of personal information by users of social media requires greater stress on theoretical, epistemological, and empirical research in information privacy. Businesses’ increasing use of big data also will likely give rise to new privacy concerns. Therefore, research on information privacy is needed to address how factors related to technological change and societal trends are combining to reshape privacy expectations and their implications.

Information Systems Journal (ISJ) is issuing this call for a special issue on privacy to facilitate the development of rigorous IS research and theory development in the field. The goal of this special issue is to encourage high quality research papers that have implications for addressing the need for a paradigm shift in understanding and addressing privacy in today’s digital economy. The possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following five themes:

1. Reconciling privacy goals. Two recent privacy literature reviews suggest that the majority of privacy goals to date have focused on withholding information disclosure, increasing information control, and restricting information access (Bélanger and Crossler 2011; Smith et al. 2011). In the context of social media, these traditional privacy goals are opposed to the goal of connecting via social networks in order to develop and maintain social relationships. According to Lipford et al. (2012), privacy should be characterized as a broader process whereby individuals and groups coordinate social interaction with others. In this broader conceptualization, privacy goals in social media should differ from traditional online privacy goals because of its change of agency (from the self to a group), its inclusion of interactional and interpersonal privacy decision making, and its collective domain where the user and her social ties share responsibilities for keeping their shared data safe and private. We invite researchers to understand privacy goals beyond binary decisions to withhold or disclose information and to explore conceptual underpinnings of privacy in the context of social media.

2. Contextual nature of privacy. There has been a recent call for research to investigate the contextual nature of privacy (Nissenbaum 2010; John et al. 2011). People’s expectations and problems concerning privacy may all differ when moving among areas of computation and tasks (Xu et al. 2012a; Conger et al. 2013). What may be a privacy concern in healthcare websites may be a very different problem for users than in social networking websites. As Smith et al. (2011) pointed out, the context-sensitive nature of privacy makes it clear that questions about privacy necessarily imply specifying privacy “for whom” and “from whom,” “about what,” “for what reasons,” “under what conditions,” and “for what kinds of social roles and relationships.” According to Nissenbaum (2010), context-specific concerns for information privacy ties the notion of privacy to “norms of specific contexts, demanding that information  gathering  and  dissemination  be  appropriate  to  that context  and  obey  the  governing  norms  of  distribution  within  it (p.101)”. We invite researchers to explore the contextual nature of privacy and to understand what constitutes information privacy or privacy violations under different contexts.

3. Moving beyond the individual level of analysis. The majority of privacy studies to date have adopted the individual as the unit of analysis (Bélanger and Crossler 2011; Smith et al. 2011). It is not surprising that most studies are designed at this level because it is relatively easier to collect data through surveys to examine individuals’ perceptions of various privacy-related practices (Smith et al. 2011). However, “much of this focus on individual-level privacy perceptions and relationships has been at the expense of our understanding at other levels of analysis” (Smith et al. 2011, p. 1006). We, therefore, invite researchers to examine privacy issues and impacts at other levels, adopting the dyad, group, organization, sector, or societal as the unit of analysis.

4. Studying actual outcomes. Previous research has advocated the importance of establishing preventative approaches to reduce privacy threats and protect personal information, through policies, privacy-enhancing technologies, and administrative processes. However, the effectiveness of these approaches remains unclear, especially with the latest research disclosing users’ misbehaviors, such as lack of adherence and compliance. The literature is less vocal in capturing the actual outcomes of privacy-related constructs (Belanger and Crossler 2011). Outcomes should be interpreted as “actual changes of state or behavior; this is distinct from an examination of attitudes, beliefs, and intentions (Smith et al. 2011, p.1007).” For example, outcomes at the individual level could include actual changes of privacy settings to restrict information access, or actual amount of information disclosure (Hui et al. 2007). Organizational outcomes could include documented violations of privacy, successful prosecutions of privacy violations, and business impacts of implementing privacy safeguards (Culnan and Williams 2009).

5. Designing privacy artifacts. A significant amount of existing privacy research in information systems has focused on studies providing explanations and predictions of the phenomenon, with very few studies attempting to provide design and action contributions (Belanger and Crossler 2011). Yet, there is a need for both the design of IT artifacts for privacy protection and for an evaluation of such artifacts. As suggested by the design science perspective, an evaluation of design guidelines could also provide substantial benefit to the field. With a few recent exceptions (e.g., Xu et al., 2012b; Bélanger et al., 2013), few information systems researchers have considered the interaction between IT privacy artifacts and individual behaviors. This is likely a fruitful area of research in need of further exploration. We, therefore, invite researchers to answer the call for “more design and action information privacy research to be published in journal articles that can result in IT artifacts for protection or control of information privacy” (Bélanger and Crossler 2011, p. 1017).

Deadlines and Submission Instructions

Submissions to the special issue are due no later than Jan 15, 2014. All submissions must adhere to the formatting guidelines for Information Systems Journal. Submissions for the full papers must be made to the ISJ’s Manuscript Central Account: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/isj, where you should select the Special Issue as the submission type.

The review process will proceed as follows:

• All manuscripts will be prescreened by the Guest Editors and only papers that have a reasonable chance of acceptance after a maximum of two rounds of review will enter the review process. Manuscripts that do not pass this hurdle will not be further considered for the special issue but authors may consider revising papers for submission to ISJ through the normal submission process.

• Manuscripts that pass the initial screening will be subject to a formal review process. A maximum of two review cycles will occur.

• Authors must adhere to a strict schedule for submission and revisions. The first round of reviews will be provided within 3 months of submission (April 15, 2014). Revised manuscripts must be returned within 3 months of receipt of the reviews (July 15, 2014). The second round of reviews will be completed by Aug 31, 2014. Final acceptance will be announced by Sept 30, 2014.

Important dates for the Special Issue on Reframing Privacy are:

• Initial submission due: Jan 15, 2014
• First round decisions: April 15, 2014
• Revised manuscripts due: July 15, 2014
• Final decisions: Aug 31, 2014

Early submissions are welcome and will be put into the review process as soon as possible.

Editorial Review Board

Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Corey Angst, University of Notre Dame, USA
Louise Barkhuus, Stockholm University, Sweden
Christian Bonnici, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Burcu Bulgurcu, Boston College, USA
Hasan Cavusoglu, University of British Columbia, Canada
Sue Conger, University of Dallas, USA
Robert E. Crossler, Mississippi State University, USA
Mary J. Culnan, American University, USA
Tamara Dinev, Florida Atlantic University, USA
Beverly Hope, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Kai-Lung Hui, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
Mark Keith, Bringham Young University, USA
Sung Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison, USA
Bart Knijnenburg, University of California - Irvine, USA
Hanna Krasnova, Humboldt-University, Germany
Airi Lampinen, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland
Han Li, Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA
Xin "Robert" Luo, University of New Mexico, USA
George Milne, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Caroline Miltgen, University of Angers, France
Sameer Patil, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, Finland
Chee Wei Phang, Fudan University, China
Clay Posey, University of Alabama, USA
H. Raghav Rao, University at Buffalo, USA
H. Jeff Smith, Miami University, USA
Fred Stutzman, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, USA
Juliana Sutanto, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Chuan-Hoo Tan, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Weiquan Wang, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Pamela Wisniewski, The Pennsylvania State University, USA

References

Bélanger, F., and Crossler, R.E. (2011) Privacy in the Digital Age: A Review of Information Privacy Research in Information Systems. MIS Quarterly, 35(4), 1017-1041.
Bélanger, F., Crossler, R. E., Hiller, J. S., Hsiao, M., and Park, J-P. (2013) POCKET: A Tool for Protecting Children’s Privacy Online. Decision Support Systems, 54(2), 1161-1173.
Conger, S., Pratt, J.H., and Loch, K.D. (2013) Personal Information Privacy and Emerging Technologies. Information Systems Journal, forthcoming.
Culnan, M.J., and Williams, C.C. (2009) How Ethics Can Enhance Organizational Privacy: Lessons from the ChoicePoint and TJX Data Breaches. MIS Quarterly, 33(4), 673-687.
Hui, K. L., Teo, H. H., and Lee, S.-Y.T. (2007) The Value of Privacy Assurance: An Exploratory Field Experiment. MIS Quarterly, 31(1), 19-33.
John, L., Acquisti, A. and Loewenstein, G. (2011) Strangers on a Plane: Context-dependent Willingness to Divulge Personal Information. Journal of Consumer Research, 37(5), 858-873.
Lipford, R.H., Wisniewski, J.P., Lampe, C., Kisselburgh, L., and Caine, K. (2012) Workshop on Reconciling Privacy with Social Media. The ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://phitlab.host22.com/cscw2012/
Nissenbaum, H. (2010) Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, Stanford Law Books.
Smith, H.J., Dinev, T., and Xu, H. (2011) Information Privacy Research: An Interdisciplinary Review. MIS Quarterly, 35(4), 989-1015.
Xu, H., Teo, H.H., Tan, B.C.Y., and Agarwal, R. (2012a) Effects of Individual Self-Protection, Industry Self-Regulation, and Government Regulation on Privacy Concerns: A Study of Location-Based Services. Information Systems Research 23(4), 1342-1363.
Xu, H., Crossler, R. E., Bélanger, F. (2012b) A Value Sensitive Design Investigation of Privacy-Enhancing Tools in Web Browsers. Decision Support Systems, 54(1), 424-433.



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