Understanding the Privacy Issue in the Digital Age: An Expert Perspective

The importance of privacy has been the subject of much debate for centuries. While the public opinion continues to value and desire privacy, the level of privacy afforded to citizens continues to diminish owing to the continued, rapid pace of technological advances. With the imminent transition to the Internet of Things (IoT), the future of privacy is uncertain and in danger. In order to understand what the future holds for privacy, we leverage the predictions made by 2511 privacy experts. Utilizing semantic analysis, we identify the emerging privacy-related concepts and explore the relationships between these concepts. The resultant framework will be compared to existing privacy frameworks to determine the influence of individual and external factors such as demographics and culture on experts’ predictions, and to identify fruitful avenues for future privacy research in the digital age. The study will also provide actionable recommendations for developing privacy preserving and enhancing tools