Linking Loose Ends: An Interdisciplinary Privacy and Communication Model

In the recent decades, privacy scholarship has made significant progress. Most of it was achieved in monodisciplinary works. However, privacy has a deeply interdisciplinary nature. Most importantly, societies as well as individuals experience privacy as being influenced by legal, technical, and social norms and structures. In this paper, we hence attempt to connect insights of different academic disciplines into a joint model, an Interdisciplinary Privacy and Communication Model. The model differentiates four different elements: Communication context, protection needs, threat and risk analysis, as well as protection enforcement. On the one hand, with this model we aim to describe how privacy unfolds. On the other hand, the model also prescribes how privacy can be furnished and regulated. As such, the model contributes to a general understanding of privacy as a theoretical guide and offers a practical basis to address new challenges of the digital age.