Digital Transformation and the Future of Privacy

The rise of digital commerce, smartphones and social media and now the tsunami of artificial intelligence have led to the digital transformation of organisations and everyday life, creating anxiety about privacy. Privacy becomes a matter of public concern, as organisational systems are compromised, data misappropriated and our personal choices commoditised. We are left with the vain hope privacy carries some meaning in a digitalised world. This book seeks to humanise the digital privacy debate, expose different pathways to considering digital privacy, try out a collection of critical lenses to see if anything strikes a chord and suggests new insights and a way forward.

This volume pursues a range of disciplines, metaphors and historical contexts to try to find different ways of thinking about digital privacy and expand the landscape we work in both theoretically and practically. It examines a range of technologies, including generative AI, blockchain and augmented reality. Privacy is treated as lived experience, something that requires a phenomenological orientation. Hence, this book offers a new definition of privacy. It proposes a different approach to digital privacy through the practice of virtuous privacy. It draws on a toolbox of theoretical lenses and counters the temptation to abstraction through metaphors.

This book will be useful for courses on digital transformation, digital ethics and digital privacy. It will appeal to privacy researchers in both management and computer science, as well as privacy consultants and data controllers in organisations.

Neil McBride is Reader in Information Technology Management at De Montfort University, Leicester, where he teaches systems thinking, information systems management, privacy and surveillance studies. His research covers applied AI ethics, addressing health, justice and transport. He has industry and consultancy experience of systems design and application development, including assembler programming of early distributed systems. He has a PhD and post-doctoral experience in recombinant DNA technology. His current interests include decision-making models, the phenomenology of AI and poetry.