Privacy

The creators of technical infrastructure are under social and legal pressure to comply with expectations that can be difficult to translate into computational and business logics. This dissertation bridges this gap through three projects that focus on privacy engineering, information security, and data economics, respectively. These projects culminate in a new formal method for evaluating the strategic and tactical value of data: data games. This method relies on a core theoretical contribution building on the work of Shannon, Dretske, Pearl, Koller, and Nissenbaum: a definition of situated information flow as causal flow in the context of other causal relations and strategic choices.

We analyze the concept videos of Google Glass and Microsoft Hololens, viewing them as design fictions that project a vision about the future of computing. Analyzing these videos along with media articles during the time period after the products were announced but before they were available to the public, we begin to see how people use the videos to imagine different types of futures - including imagining different implications that these technologies might have on privacy.