Privacy Through Multiple Lenses : Applying the St. Gallen Multi-Layered Privacy Interaction Framework (SG-PIF)

This article puts the St. Gallen Multi-Layered Privacy Interaction Framework (SG-PIF) into action. The SG-PIF aims to conceptualize privacy as an outcome of various aspects of life and society. Different levels of interaction between individuals' privacy behavior, understood as a decision-making process on whether to disclose personal information, and their environment are subject of investigation. Those layers include the personal level, organizations, society at large and the government. Thus the SG-PIF includes not only psychological aspects of privacy but also the economic, social, cultural, and legal factors that affect individual decision-making processes. The focus of the framework rests on the interaction of these layers or the reciprocal nature of them and the analysis of the impact on individual privacy behavior (Section 2). We use two case-studies to demonstrate how the SG-PIF can be applied to structure the analysis of privacy-related phenomena. The first case study treats the privacy-intrusive practice of email tracking (Section 3). The second one looks at the more futuristic developments in robotics and the impact on individual privacy (Section 4).