Connecting Social Science and Information Technology: Democratic Privacy in the Information Age

This work has two main ambitions. First, we will develop a generic framework which, properly used, can drastically reduce the intrinsic complexity of the continually evolving IT-environment, making it less unwieldy. That should prove advantageous for anyone trying to analyse social aspects of the moving target that is classified as "IT".

Using (and at the same time demonstrating) his framework, we will then theoretically study and reformulate one aspect that has been extensively, but not always fruitfully, discussed with specific reference to the emergence of new communications technologies: privacy. Itself an ambiguous concept, privacy will be contemplated from a democratic-theoretical position. The eventual theoretical product will be a privacy subset labelled democratic privacy, which is considered an indispensable ingredient in a liberal-democratic society. Relevant aspects of the concept will be connected to the framework developed in part one to facilitate future analytical efforts.

Democratic privacy is intended to be used as a benchmark and an analytical tool in its own right, and this will be demonstrated in a brief empirical study focusing on Swedish integrity legislation.