PETs in the Surveillance Society: A Critical Review of the Potentials and Limitations of the Privacy as Confidentiality Paradigm

“Privacy as confidentiality” has been the dominant paradigm in computer science privacy research. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) that guarantee confidentiality of personal data or anonymous communication have resulted from such research. The objective of this chapter is to show that such PETs are indispensable but are short of being the privacy solutions they sometimes claim to be given current day circumstances. We will argue using perspectives from surveillance studies that the computer scientists’ conception of privacy through data or communication confidentiality is techno-centric and displaces end-user perspectives and needs in a surveillance society. We will further show that the perspectives from surveillance studies demand a critical review for their human-centric conception of information systems. Last, we re-position PETs in a surveillance society and argue for the necessity for multiple paradigms for privacy and related design.