8.2.1 Resource Characteristics and Classifying Goods in Cyberspace

Digging into the GKC framework, beginning on the left side of Figure 8.2, there are an array of characteristics to consider, including “facilities through which information is accessed” such as the Internet itself, as well as “artifacts … including … computer files” and the “ideas themselves” (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014, 10). The “artifacts” category is especially relevant in cybersecurity discussions, given that it includes trade secrets protections, which are closer to a pure private good than a public good and are also the currency of global cybercrime (Reference Shackelford, Proia, Craig and MartellShackelford et al., 2015). Internet governance institutions (or “facilities” in this vernacular) can also control the rate at which ideas are diffused, such as through censorship taking subtle (e.g., YouTube’s decision to take down Nazi-themed hate speech videos) or extreme (e.g., China’s Great Firewall) forms (Reference BeechBeech, 2016).

There is also a related issue to consider: what type of “good” is at issue in the cybersecurity context? In general, goods are placed into four categories, depending on whether they fall on the spectra of exclusion and subtractability (Reference BuckBuck, 1998). Exclusion refers to the relative ease with which goods may be protected. Subtractability evokes the extent to which one’s use of a good decreases another’s enjoyment of it. If it is easy to exclude others from the use of a good, coupled with a high degree of subtractability, then the type of good is likely to be characterized as “private goods” that are defined by property law and best regulated by the market (Reference Hiller and ShackelfordHiller and Shackelford, 2018). Examples in the IoT context are plentiful, from smart speakers to refrigerators. Legal rights, including property rights, to these goods include the right of exclusion discussed above. At the opposite end of the spectrum, where exclusion is difficult and subtractability is low, goods are more likely characterized as “public goods” that might be best managed by governments (Reference Ostrom, Ostrom, Cole and McGinnisOstrom and Ostrom, 2015). An example is national defense, including, some argue, cybersecurity (Reference OstromOstrom, 2009). This is an area of some debate, though, given the extensive private sector ownership of critical infrastructure, which makes drawing a clear line between matters of corporate governance and national security difficult.

In its totality, the IoE includes all forms of goods, including private devices and municipal broadband networks, catalyzing a range of positive and negative externalities from network effects to cyberattacks. For example, the IoE includes digital communities as a form of club good, with societies being able to set their own rights of access; a contemporary example is the efforts of Reddit moderators to stop trolls, limit hate speech, and promote a more civil dialogue among users (Reference RooseRoose, 2017). Such communal property rights may either be recognized by the state, or be based on a form of “benign neglect” (Reference BuckBuck, 1998, 5). Indeed, as of this writing, there is an active debate underway in the United States and Europe about the regulation of social-media platforms to limit the spread of terrorist propaganda, junk news, sex trafficking, and hate speech. Such mixed types of goods are more the norm than the exception. As Cole has argued:

Naturally, the next question is whether, in fact, cyberspace may be comparable to the atmosphere as an impure public good, since pure public goods do not present the same sort of governance challenges, such as the well-studied “tragedy of the commons” scenario, which predicts the gradual overexploitation of common pool resources (Reference Feeny, Berkes, Mccay and AchesonFeeny et al., 1990). Though cyberspace is unique given that it can, in fact, expand such as through the addition of new networks (Jordan, 1990), increased use also multiplies threat vectors (Reference DeibertDeibert, 2012).

Solutions to the tragedy of the commons typically “involve the replacement of open access with restricted access and use via private property, common property, or public property/regulatory regimes” (Reference FrischmannFrischmann, Madison, and Strandburg, 2014, 54). However, in practice, as Elinor Ostrom and numerous others have shown, self-organization is in fact possible in practice, as is discussed later (Reference FrischmannFrischmann, 2018). The growth of the IoE could hasten such tragedies if vulnerabilities replete in this ecosystem are allowed to go unaddressed.

8.2.2 Community Attributes

The next box element on the left side of the GKC framework, titled “Attributes of the Community,” refers to the network of users making use of the given resource (Reference SmithSmith, 2017). In the natural commons context, communities can be macro (at the global scale when considering the impacts of global climate change) or micro, such as with shared access to a forest or lake. Similarly, in the cyber context, communities come in every conceivable scale and format from private pages on Facebook to peer-to-peer communities to the global community of more than four billion global Internet users as of October 2018, not to mention the billions of devices comprising the IoE. Even such a broad conceptualization omits impacted non-user stakeholders and infrastructure, as may be seen in the push to utilize 5G connectivity, AI, and analytics to power a “safe city” revolution, albeit one built on Huawei architecture. The scale of the multifaceted cyber threat facing the public and private sector parallels in complexity the battle to combat the worst effects of global climate change (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014; Reference ShackelfordShackelford, 2016). Such a vast scale stretches the utility of the GKC framework, which is why most efforts have considered subparts, or clubs, within this digital ecosystem.

An array of polycentric theorists, including Professor Ostrom, have extolled the benefits of small, self-organized communities in the context of managing common pool resources (Reference Ostrom, Burger, Field, Norgaard and PolicanskyOstrom, 1999). Anthropological evidence has confirmed the benefits of small-scale governance. However, micro-communities can ignore other interests, as well as the wider impact of their actions, online and offline (Reference MurrayMurray, 2007). A polycentric model favoring bottom-up governance but with a role for common standards and baseline rules so as to protect against free riders may be the best-case scenario for IoE governance, as is explored further. Such self-regulation has greater flexibility to adapt to dynamic technologies faster than top-down regulations, which even if enacted, can result in unintended consequences, as seen now in the debates surrounding California’s 2018 IoT law. As of January 2020, this law would require “any manufacturer of a device that connects ‘directly or indirectly’ to the Internet … [to] equip it with ‘reasonable’ security features, designed to prevent unauthorized access, modification, or information disclosure” (Reference RobertsonRobertson, 2018). Yet, it is not a panacea, as we will see, and there is plentiful evidence that simple rule sets – especially when they are generated in consultation with engaged and empowered communities – can produce better governance outcomes.

8.2.3 Rules-in-Use

This component of the GKC framework comprises both community norms along with formal legal rules. One of the driving questions in this area is identifying the appropriate governance level at which to formalize norms into rules, for example, whether that is at a constitutional level, collective-choice level, etc. (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014, 56). That is easier said than done in the cybersecurity context, given the wide range of industry norms, standards – such as the National Institute for Standards and Technology Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF) – state-level laws, sector-specific federal laws, and international laws regulating everything from banking transactions to prosecuting cybercriminals. Efforts have been made to begin to get a more comprehensive understanding of the various norms and laws in place, such as through the International Telecommunication Union’s (ITU)’s Global Cybersecurity Index and the Carnegie Endowment International Cybersecurity Norms Project, but such efforts remain at an early stage of development. A variety of rules may be considered to help address governance gaps, such as position and choice rules that define the rights and responsibilities of actors, such as IoT manufacturers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as is shown in Table 8.1 (Reference Ostrom, Crawford and OstromOstrom and Crawford, 2005). Given the degree to which core critical infrastructure – such as smart grids and Internet-connected medical devices – are also subsumed within IoT debates, there is a great deal of overlap between potential rule sets from incentivizing the use of cybersecurity standards and frameworks, as is happening in Ohio to hardening supply chains.

Table 8.1Types of rules

Many of these rules have cyber analogues, which emphasize cybersecurity information sharing through public–private partnerships to address common cyber threats, penalize firms and even nations for lax cybersecurity due diligence, and define the duties – including liability – of actors, such as Facebook and Google (Reference ReardonReardon, 2018).

The question of what governance level is most appropriate to set the rules for IoT devices is pressing, with an array of jurisdictions, including California, pressing ahead. For example, aside from its IoT-specific efforts, California’s 2018 Consumer Privacy Act is helping to set a new transparency-based standard for US privacy protections. Although not comparable to the EU’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) discussed later, it does include provisions that allow consumers to sue over data breaches, including in the IoT context, and decide when, and how, their data is being gathered and used by companies (Reference AdlerAdler, 2018). Whether such state-level action, even in a state with an economic footprint as the size of California, will help foster enhanced cybersecurity due diligence across the broader IoE ecosystem remains to be seen.

8.2.4 Action Arenas

The arena is just that, the place where decisions are made, where “collective action succeeds or fails” (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014, 59). Such arenas exist at three levels within the GKC framework – constitutional, collective-choice, and operational. Decisions made at each of these governance levels, in turn, impact a range of rules and community attributes, which is an important feature of the framework. Examples of decision-makers in each arena in the cybersecurity context include (1) at the constitutional level, judges deciding the bounds of “reasonable care” and “due diligence” (Reference Shackelford, Richards, Raymond and CraigShackleford, 2015); (2) federal and state policymakers at the collective-choice (e.g., policy) level, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) policing unfair and deceptive trade practices; and (3) at the operational level, firms, households, and everyone else.

8.2.5 Evaluation Criteria

The final component, according to Cole, is “the most neglected and underdeveloped” of the frameworks (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014, 62). Elinor Ostrom, for example, offered the following “evaluative criteria” in considering how best to populate it, including “(1) economic efficiency; (2) fiscal equivalence; (3) redistributional equity; (4) accountability; (5) conformance to values of local actors; and (6) sustainability” (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014, 62). In the GKC context, these criteria might include “(1) increasing scientific knowledge; (2) sustainability and preservation; (3) participation standards; (4) economic efficiency; (5) equity through fiscal equivalence; and (6)  redistributional equity” (Reference MurrayHess and Ostrom, 2007, 62). This lack of rigor might simply be due to the fact that, in the natural commons context, the overriding goal has been “long-run resource sustainability” (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014, 62). It is related, in some ways, to the “Outcomes” element missing from the GKC framework but present in the IAD framework, which references predictable outcomes of interactions from social situations, which can include consequences for both resource systems and units. Although such considerations are beyond the findings of the IAD framework, in the cybersecurity context, an end goal to consider is defining and implementing cyber peace.

“Cyber peace,” which has also been called “digital peace,” is a term that is increasingly used, but it also remains an arena of little consensus. It is clearly more than the “absence of violence” online, which was the starting point for how Professor Johan Galtung described the new field of peace studies he helped create in 1969 (Reference GaltungGaltung, 1969). Similarly, Galtung argued that finding universal definitions for “peace” or “violence” was unrealistic, but rather the goal should be landing on an apt “subjectivistic” definition agreed to by the majority (Reference GaltungGaltung, 1969, 168). He undertook this effort in a broad, yet dynamic, way recognizing that as society and technology changes, so too should our conceptions of peace and violence. That is why he defined violence as “the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is” (Reference GaltungGaltung, 1969, 168).

Cyber peace is defined here not as the absence of conflict, what may be called negative cyber peace. Rather, it is the construction of a network of multilevel regimes that promote global, just, and sustainable cybersecurity by clarifying the rules of the road for companies and countries alike to help reduce the threats of cyber conflict, crime, and espionage to levels comparable to other business and national security risks. To achieve this goal, a new approach to cybersecurity is needed that seeks out best practices from the public and private sectors to build robust, secure systems, and couches cybersecurity within the larger debate on Internet governance. Working together through polycentric partnerships of the kind described later, we can mitigate the risk of cyber war by laying the groundwork for a positive cyber peace that respects human rights, spreads Internet access along with best practices, and strengthens governance mechanisms by fostering multi-stakeholder collaboration (Reference Galtung and ChristieGaltung, 2012). The question of how best to achieve this end is open to interpretation. As Cole argues, “[f]rom a social welfare perspective, some combination of open- and closed-access is overwhelmingly likely to be more socially efficient than complete open or close-access” (Reference Cole, Frischmann, Madison and StrandburgCole, 2014, 61). Such a polycentric approach is also a necessity in the cyber regime complex, given the prevalence of private and public sector stakeholder controls.

In the cybersecurity context, increasing attention has been paid identifying lessons from the green movement to consider the best-case scenario for a sustainable cyber peace. Indeed, cybersecurity is increasingly integral to discussions of sustainable development – including Internet access – which could inform the evaluative criteria of a sustainable cyber peace in the IoE. Such an approach also accords with the “environmental metaphor for information law and policy” that has been helpful in other efforts (Reference FrischmannFrischmann, Madison, and Strandburg, 2014, 16).

It is important to recognize the polycentric nature of the IoE to ascertain the huge number of stakeholders – including users – that can and should have a say in contributing to legitimate governance. Indeed, such concerns over “legitimate” Internet governance have been present for decades, especially since the creation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Given the pushback against that organization as a relatively top-down artificial construct as compared to the more bottom-up Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), legitimacy in the IoE should be predicated to the extent possible locally through independent (and potentially air gapped) networks, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and nested state, federal, and international law. To conceptualize such system, the literature on regime complexes might prove helpful, which is discussed next in the context of blockchain technology.

9.3.1 Background Environment

Smart devices are pervasive in Americans’ lives and homes. We interact with a wide range of these supposedly smart systems all the time, whether we recognize and consent to them or not, from Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) technologies tracking drivers’ locations (Reference JohJoh, 2016) to Disney World’s MagicBand system (Reference Borkowski, Sandrick, Wagila, Goller, Chen and ZhaoBorkowski et al., 2016) to Alexa in dorm rooms (Reference Manikonda, Deotale and KambhampatiManikonda et al., 2018). These devices, which are part of a larger digital networked environment, collect massive amounts of data that surreptitiously capture human behaviors and support overt sociotechnical interactions in public and private spaces.

It is notable that there are very different scales of use and applications of smart devices, with many deployed publicly without public input. In contrast, smart devices in individuals’ homes are most often configured by the users themselves with appropriate use negotiated within households. Notable exceptions include the controversial and well-publicized implementations of smart locks and systems in rental housing (e.g., Reference Geeng and RoesnerGeeng and Roesner, 2019) and uses of IoT to surveil victims by perpetrators of domestic violence (Reference Tanczer, Neira, Parkin, Patel and DanezisTanczer et al., 2018). These consumer IoT devices have wildly different patterns of interactions and governance. They are operated under complex arrangements of legal obligations, cultural conditions, and social norms without clear insight into how to apply these formal and informal constraints.

It is thus important to establish applicable norms and evaluate rules-in-use to support good governance of consumer IoT moving forward. Understanding interactions where users have some control of institutional arrangements involving their devices is helpful toward this end. We therefore focus on consumers’ everyday use of smart devices, primarily smartphones, wearables, and in-home smart devices. It is our objective to understand both how users would like information flows associated with these devices to be governed and how their privacy perceptions are formed.

The background context for personal and in-home IoT device use extends beyond individual interactions with smart devices. It includes aggregation of information flows from devices and interactions between them, discussion about the relevant normative values surrounding device use, and governance of information flows. There are distinct challenges in establishing norms, given that there is no default governance for data generated, as knowledge resources, or predictable patterns of information to help form user expectations.

Our survey respondents documented the devices they owned, which aligned with recent consumer surveys of IoT prevalence (e.g., Reference Kumar, Shen, Case, Garg, Alperovich, Kuznetsov, Gupta and DurumericKumar et al., 2019). About 75 percent of respondents reported owning more than one smart device, with 64 percent owning a smart TV and 55 percent owning a Digital Personal Assistant (such as an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod). Smartwatches were also very popular. A small percentage of respondents owned smart lightbulbs or other Internet-connected appliances.

As these devices become increasingly popular and interconnected, the contexts in which they are used are increasingly complex and fraught with value tensions, making it important to further study user preferences in order to develop appropriate governance. For example, digital personal assistants don’t clearly replace any previous analogous devices or systems. They therefore lack pre-existing norms or underlying values about appropriateness to guide use. In contrast, smart televisions are obviously analogous to traditional televisions and are thereby used in ways largely guided by existing norms. These existing norms have often been shaped by entrenched values but do not always apply to emerging information flows from and to new smart features. The resulting tensions can be resolved by identifying relevant values and establishing appropriate governing institutions around IoT information flows. To do so, it is first important to understand the relevant factors (attributes) so as to clarify how, when, and for what purpose changes in information flows governance are and are not appropriate.

9.3.2 Attributes

9.3.2.1 Resources

Resources in the IoT context include both (1) the data generated by devices and (2) knowledge about information flows and governance. The latter also includes characteristics of these devices, including necessary supporting technologies and personal information relevant to the IoT action arena.

The modern home includes a range of devices and appliances with Internet-connectivity. Some of these devices are Internet-connected versions of existing appliances, for example, refrigerators, TVs, thermostats, lightbulbs. Other devices, such as digital assistants (e.g., Amazon Echo and Google Home), are new. These devices produce knowledge by generating and consuming information flows. For example, a smart thermostat uses environmental sensors to collect information about home temperature and communicates this information to cloud servers for remote control and monitoring functionality. Similar information flows across devices are causing the IoT ecosystem to evolve beyond the established social norms. For example, now refrigerators order food, toasters tweet, and personal health monitors detect sleeping and exercise routines. This rapid change in the extent and content of information flows about in-home activities leads to a mismatch between users’ expectations and the IoT status quo. Furthermore, mismatches extend beyond privacy to features, as some new “smart” functions are introduced for novelty sake, rather than consumer preferences, such as kitchen appliances that are connected to social media.

Our survey respondents’ comments reveal discrepancies between users’ privacy perceptions/preferences and how IoT devices are actually used. This provides further insight into the attributes of data resources within this context by illustrating what is considered to be appropriate. For example, some respondents noted that even though they have smart TVs, they disconnect them from the Internet to limit communication between devices. Generally, our survey results highlight the range of confusion about how smart devices work and what information flows they send.

A few respondents implied that they were only learning about IoT cross-device communications through the scenarios described in our survey, describing their surprise (e.g., “How they already know that. How did it get from my phone to the tv? That seems very fishy”) or in some cases absolute disbelief (“I see no connection between what I’m doing on the phone and a random TV ad”) that such a thing was possible. One respondent specifically summarized this confusion amidst common experiences with new technologies:

At first, you are concerned. The lightning fast speed at which Google hits you in the heads [sic] for an item you were considering buying makes you believe they are spying on you. They aren’t spying, because spying implies watching you without your permission, but in using the service you give them complete permission to use any data you put into search queries, posts, etc, to connect you to items you are shopping for, even if it is just to look around.

Social media consumers do not understand that they are NOT the customer. They are the product. The customer is the numerous businesses that pay the platform (Google, Facebook, etc) various rates to get their product in front of customers most likely to pay. Radio did this long before Cable TV who did this long before Social Media companies. It’s a practice as old as steam.

This quotation highlights perceived deception about information collection practices by popular online platforms and IoT devices. Users of IoT devices are shaping their expectations and practices amidst a lack of transparency about privacy and problematic notions of informed consent (e.g., Reference Okoyomon, Samarin, Wijesekera, Elazari Bar On, Vallina-Rodriguez, Reyes and EgelmanOkoyomon et al., 2019). This respondent also touches on the inextricable links between the two knowledge resources; when users have poor, confusing, or limited explanations of information flows, they fail to understand that they are a resource and that their data is a product.

As Figure 9.3 illustrates, respondents learn about IoT information flows and privacy from a variety of different sources. Online forums represent the most prevalent source of privacy information, yet only just over 30 percent of respondents turn to online forums of IoT users with privacy questions. Privacy policies and discussions with friends and family were also common sources of privacy information, but even these were only consulted by 28 percent and 25 percent of respondents, respectively. Respondents turned to technical and legal experts for privacy information even less frequently, with only 9 percent and 3 percent of respondents reporting these sources, respectively. Overall, there was no single source of privacy information consulted by a majority of respondents.

Figure 9.3

Where respondents learn about the privacy implications of IoT devices

9.3.3 Governance

Through the lens of the GKC framework, including the institutional grammar, we gain insight into different aspects of governance. We can capture how the main decision-making actors, individual institutions, and the norms governing individual information flows emerge and change over time, as well as how these norms might be enforced. Results also indicate that privacy, as appropriate flows of personal information, governs interactions with and uses of IoT devices. For example, we see evidence that anonymization, as a condition modifying the information type and its association with a specific subject within an information flow, does not serve as meaningful governance from the perspective of respondents. Fifty-five percent of respondents stated that they would not change their behavior, or support cross-device communication, just because data was anonymized. It is not immediately clear, from responses to that question alone, what leads to divergence on this interpretation of anonymization or any other perceptions about specific information flows. However, it echoes theorization about CI that incomplete transmission principles are not helpful in understanding information flows (e.g., Reference Bhatia and BreauxBhatia and Breaux, 2018), extending this idea to governance; the condition of anonymity is not a stand-alone transmission principle.

This aligns with our approach combining the GKC and CI frameworks to gauge the explicit and implicit norms that govern information flows within a given context. The CI framework captures norms using five essential parameters of information flows. Four of the parameters capture the actors and information type involved in an information flow. The fifth parameter, transmission principle, constrains information flows. The transmission principle serves as a bridging link between the CI and GKC frameworks. Figure 9.4 shows the average score for perceived appropriateness for an information flow without qualifying it with the transmission principle. We remind the reader that the respondents were first presented with information flow descriptions using sender, subject, information type, recipient, and modal parameters. They rated the appropriateness of these flows on a 6-point Likert scale from “very inappropriate” (-2) to “very appropriate” (+2).

Figure 9.4

Average perceptions of information flows by parameter

This figure illustrates the average participant opinion of information flows controlled to specific examples of information type and subject, modalities, recipients, and senders.

Figure 9.5

The impact of specific parameters in changing respondent perceptions of information flows.

This figure indicates the average change in perceptions in response to specific examples for each parameter. It does not indicate initial perceptions, in contrast to Figure 9.4.

For the GKC framework questions in the first part of the survey, 73 percent of respondents reported that they would change their behaviors in response to third-party sharing. Specific actions they would take are illustrated in Figure 9.6. Figure 9.4 shows that respondents view a “manufacturer” recipient less negatively than a generic third party. Additionally, not stating a recipient all together has a lesser negative effect on information flow acceptability than a generic “third party” recipient. We can speculate that when the recipient is omitted, the respondents mentally substitute a recipient that fits their internal privacy model, as shown in previous research (Reference Martin and NissenbaumMartin and Nissenbaum, 2016).

Figure 9.6

User actions in response to third-party sharing scenarios

We further gauge the effect on user perceptions of aims, conditions, modalities, and consequences as components of transmission principles. Figure 9.5 illustrates changes in average perceptions based on the addition of specific aims, conditions, and consequences to the description of an information flow. We see that stating a condition (such as asking for consent, upon notification or keeping the data anonymous) has a positive effect on the perception of appropriateness. Conversely, we see that not stating an aim correlates with positive perception, while the respondents seemed on average neutral towards “for developing new features” and “for academic research” aims, they show negative attitude towards the “for advertising purposes” aim. When it comes to consequences, the results show that the respondents view not stating a consequence as equal, on average, to when the information “is necessary for the device to function properly.” However, respondents viewed information flows with the consequence “to personalize content” slightly positively, while viewing information flows with the consequence of “[generating] summary statistics” correlates with slightly negative perception.

Respondents also identified a number of additional approaches that they might take in order to better control flows of their personal information and details of their behaviors between devices. In addition to browsing anonymously and disconnecting their smart TV from the Internet, various respondents suggested:

• “Use a VPN”

• “Wouldn’t buy the TV in the first place”

• “It’s just getting worse and worse. I’ll almost certainly return it.”

• “Research and see if there is a way to not have my info collected.”

• “Be much more careful about my browsing/viewing habits.”

• “Circumvent the tracking”

• “Try to find a way to circumvent it without paying”

• “Sell it and get a plain TV”

• “Block access to my information”

• “Delete cookies”

• “Disable features”

When they perceived information flows to be inappropriate, many respondents favored rules-in-use that would circumvent inadequate exogenous governance. While many respondents favored opportunities to opt out of inappropriate flows, a small sub-population developed their own approaches to enact their privacy preferences as additional layers of governance in use. Often these work-arounds subverted or obfuscated default information flows.

9.3.4 Patterns and Outcomes

Our survey reveals a significant fragmentation within the community of IoT users relative to current governance practices, indicating irresolution in the action arena. As we piece together data on who IoT users are and how they are shaping appropriate flows of personal information from and between their smart devices, certain patterns and outcomes become evident. Table 9.4 illustrates how respondents’ preferences about third party sharing, professed concerns about privacy, and device ownership shape their average perceptions of governance outcomes around IoT. We assessed the extent to which respondents embraced technology based on the number of devices they own.

Table 9.4 divides the respondents of our survey into subcommunites based on the opinions of various IoT practices elicited from the first part of the survey. Some respondents largely have embraced IoT technologyFootnote ⁴ and are not concerned about privacy issues.Footnote ⁵ Others, while embracing the technology, are concerned about privacy issues. Concerns about third party sharing or a lack of embrace of smart technology yield very different opinions, on average. We cluster these subcommunities into three groups, in order to gauge their perceptions.

When gauging the respondents’ perceptions, we note that those who are unconcerned about the privacy implications of cross platform sharing, regardless of other values associated with information governance, have on average favorable views of information flows. Additionally, those respondents who express general concern about the privacy implications, but are not concerned about third party sharing, have similar perceptions on average. These subpopulations of our respondents are the most likely to belong to group 1, who perceive current governance of IoT information flows to be positive, on average. In contrast, those who are concerned about privacy and either don’t embrace smart technologies or express concerns about third party sharing are most likely to belong to group 3, who are slightly dissatisfied with current governance outcomes on average. Finally, group 2 is generally concerned about privacy but embraces smart devices with average perceptions slightly above neutral.

Table 9.4Average perceptions of information flow appropriateness gauged by respondent subpopulations. For each subcommunity we calculate the number of respondents and the average perception score across information flows including consequence, condition, and aim.

We now highlight the open-ended comments from respondents belonging to each group, that put their opinions in context, in an effort to better understand fragmentation and what underlying beliefs and preferences lead to divergent normative patterns. While individual comments are not representative, they illuminate individuals’ rationales underlying perceptions associated with groups.Footnote ⁶

9.4.1 Conceptual and Methodological

As home environments evolve with the introduction of new technologies, norms of governance and information flow evolve as well. The growing tradition of GKC analysis of a cooperative governance schema offers a way to uncover the contributing elements related to a shift in privacy expectations.

Our approach relies on the GKC framework to identify emerging communities in a given context and then use the CI framework to pose questions about what information flows they consider appropriate. Our methodology bridges the two frameworks by quantifying the effect of each of the elements on the collective norms by measuring how each factor affects the appropriateness of information flows in a given context. This allows researchers to gauge the effect of various factors on the formation of the norms and could be employed to structure future case studies in other contexts to understand norm formation. Our study shows that omitting a condition has an effect on appropriateness; different condition values vary the levels of appropriateness. We observed a similar effect for aims and consequences. In this sense, beyond the specific methodological contributions this gauging introduces, the design also offers a path toward overarching conceptual questions regarding norm formation. Through meta-analysis of cases structured through this approach, it would be possible to better understand privacy norm formation across contexts.

9.4.2 Practical

The GKC-CI method is useful in emerging contexts, such as IoT, which often lack established norms. We first identify the various exogenous variables that act as a proxy to understanding respondents’ disposition towards privacy. For example, certain respondents tend to be concerned about privacy and are actively pursuing ways to improve it for themselves. They read privacy policies, disable third party sharing, and find ways to circumvent the system whenever possible. Our CI analysis of the flows they deem acceptable confirms it: on average they tend to disallow flows, with notable exceptions when specific conditions, aims, and consequences align with social expectations. Another community perceives the polar opposite. They rarely read privacy policies, embrace third party sharing and don’t disable the tracking functionalities – all in the name of convenience and efficiency.

Furthermore, many respondents across interest groups perceive “anonymity” to be ineffective governance of information flows. “Anonymity” thus further fragments the overarching community of IoT users. In contrast to “consent,” “anonymity” modifies information, rather than flow, impacting the association between information type and subject. Results indicate that adding “anonymity” as governance does not meaningfully impact perceptions of acceptability or behaviors.

Our results illustrate that governance of IoT should necessarily specify all parameters of the CI framework in structuring information flows, with clear identification of aims and conditions in the transmission principles. Practically, this means that when introducing new technology, it is possible to gauge the various factors using our methodology to reveal factors that have an effect on the acceptability of newly generated flows.

Furthermore, our results confirm previous findings that respondents (n=159) look for privacy policies to understand the privacy implications (e.g., Reference Martin and NissenbaumMartin and Nissenbaum, 2016), however, some indicated in their comments that privacy policies are difficult to comprehend. Online forums and discussion with family were the other leading responses.

This result has practical implications with respect to how privacy related information could be structured and communicated so that users more intuitively understand. We propose that IoT manufacturers should clearly define all parameters according to CI and include institutional components within the transmission principle when prescribing information transfers. This could also offer a more informative and constructive discussion on the forums, with all the parameters stated explicitly.

10.4.1 Design Paradigms to Examine the Legitimacy of Privacy Rules-in-Use

As discussed in the previous section, the alignment of PBD with privacy engineering could make the former an important enactor of privacy-preserving capabilities of a sociotechnical system. Wong and Mulligan (Reference Wong and MulliganWong and Mulligan 2019) outline the important place PBD has come to occupy in the privacy policy sphere, owing to its inclusion in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, the United States Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policy recommendations, and other privacy advisory and regulatory institutions. They argue that PBD is currently, largely, dominated by engineering approaches that assume that privacy is pre-defined and exogenous to the design process, whereas HCI has a rich collection of design methodologies and tools that are capable of identifying relevant conceptualizations of privacy and related values within the design process. Such approaches, they further argue, are largely absent from policy-making and practice of PBD. Furthermore, even within HCI, they find that most PBD approaches use design and associated principles “to solve a privacy problem” or “to support or inform privacy decision making”, and that “design to explore people and situations and to critique, speculate, or present critical alternatives” – design approaches available from the field of HCI – are largely absent from both the policy-making and the practice dimensions of PBD. They argue that the latter are particularly pertinent when the “conception of privacy that ought to guide design is unknown or contested” (Reference Wong and MulliganWong and Mulligan 2019). This resonates with the GKC framework:

Both approaches emphasize the contested nature of privacy and the procedural aspects of exploring and uncovering these contestations. An important question that a synthesis of this shared emphasis raises is: what kinds of design paradigms in computer science, generally, but HCI and adjoining disciplines, specifically, provide a way for questions of governance and procedural legitimacy to enter into the design and implementation of technology that mediates or enables information flows? How can the tools and methodologies of design be employed to explore questions of governance and procedural legitimacy both to assess the appropriateness of entrenched norms or rules-in-use, and to handle previously unresolved, hidden, un-surfaced ethical disagreements?

Gurses and van Hoboken argue that contextual integrity while not tied down to concepts of time and location requires “looking back in time” to identify entrenched social norms that govern the “appropriate” information flows, in order to enable an informed and reflective design of novel socio-technical systems. Utilizing such a lens on norms, and considering the GKC framework, what can the tools and methodologies of design reveal about the procedural legitimacy of entrenched privacy norms and values?

One way forward toward exploring this question further is contained in the approaches outlined by Reference Wong and MulliganWong and Mulligan (2019), who map out the purposes for which design is employed in relation to privacy in the existing HCI literature. On examining 64 scholarly publications in HCI venues that use design in relation to privacy, they find that 56 percent use design “to solve a privacy problem,” where “privacy is a problem that has already been well-defined outside of the design process,” and 52 percent use design “to inform and support decision-making,” which foregrounds the individualized framing of privacy by focusing on providing information to users to enable them to make privacy-preserving decisions, or on the creation of tools and processes so that designers can incorporate privacy more easily in their practice. Only 22 percent used design “to explore people and situations” where design and other methodologies are used to explore what conceptualizations of privacy in varying social and cultural contexts are “at play” – an approach that has “implications for design”. Finally, only 11 percent use design to “to critique, speculate or present critical alternatives,” where questions such as “what should be considered as privacy?,” “privacy for whom?,” and “how does privacy emerge from technical, social, and legal entanglements” are considered. The latter two orientations are particularly well suited to the surfacing of privacy conceptualizations in relation to surrounding social, cultural, and political factors, yet are under-explored in the literature. These design approaches have the potential to provide tools to bring procedural legitimacy “into play in assessing whether the rules-in-use for personal information are normatively appropriate” (Reference Sanfilippo and StrandburgSanfilippo, Frischmann, and Strandburg 2018). Furthermore, these approaches directly relate to the three distinct ways identified by Sanfilippo et al. in which procedural legitimacy is in play the GKC framework: first, whether the procedures that construct the rules-in-use are deemed to be legitimate by diverse community members, and aid them in achieving their objectives; second, whether the governance practices account for the interests and needs of “impacted outsiders”; and third, whether the “exogenous rules and norms” to which a community is subject are responsive to member needs and interests.

In particular, three design methodologies are well positioned to explore these orientations: (a) speculative design, where design is undertaken to present critical alternatives (Reference Wong, Khovanskaya, Filimowicz and TzankovaWong and Khovanskaya 2018; Reference AugerAuger 2013; Reference DiSalvo, Jenkins and LodatoDiSalvo, Jenkins, and Lodato 2016); (b) value centered design, where design is used to achieve certain human values (Reference FriedmanFriedman 1997; Reference ShiltonShilton 2018); and (c) participatory design (Reference MullerMuller 2009), where design is undertaken not only for, but by impacted stakeholders.

In this section, I outline one possible direction that directly opens up points of engagement between privacy as governance of privacy rules and speculative design methodologies. Reference DiSalvo, Jenkins and LodatoDiSalvo et al. (2016) use speculative design in the context of “civic tech” as “a way to explore potential, alternative, and future conditions by articulating their existence in generative forms, with a particular focus on the complications of governance and politics disposed by computational technologies.” The tools of speculative design can speak directly to aspects of governance that the commons approach focuses on.

To summarize, design paradigms in HCI provide potent tools to explore questions of procedural legitimacy of rules-in-use in the commons governance framework. In addition to achieving, what Reference Wong and MulliganWong and Mulligan (2019) consider important, namely, broadening the notion of design in PBD, these orientations could build important bridges between the PBD framework and the GKC framework.

10.4.2 Formulation and Governance of Privacy Norms via Participatory Design

In this subsection, I explore the framework of Participatory Design (PD) in detail to consider the opportunities it presents for democratic governance of privacy norms. PD as a design methodology has historically had clear political commitments to democratic ideals. Reference PilemalmPilemalm (2018) notes that PD developed in the late 60s and early 70s (as cooperative design) with the intention of involving citizens in urban areas in Scandinavia in the planning and design of their living environments. Soon, PD entered workplaces in Scandinavia with the intention of making workplaces more democratic, and empowering workers to participate in and influence their working conditions and workplace technology through the use of collaborative design processes between the workers and the designers (Reference Bjerknes, Ehn, Kyng and NygaardBjerknes et al. 1987; Reference EhnEhn 1988; Reference Simonsen and RobertsonSimonsen and Robertson 2012). Often, this occurred by assisting workplace unions in devising technological “control activities and policies” (Asaro 2000). Subsequent “generations” of PD, particularly its variants in the United Kingdom and North America were more focused on involving users and other stakeholders in the process of design of technologies to create better systems, an adoption that largely found resonance in HCI (Reference MullerMuller 2009). Several studies since then have argued to actively re-introduce the political and ideological dimensions of PD, highlighting the importance of democracy as a core political ideal to PD (Reference BeckBeck 2002; Reference KanstrupKanstrup 2003).

Regan’s argument (Reference ReganRegan 1986; Reference Regan, Roessler and Mokrosinska2015) that privacy is both a collective and a democratic value lends credence to the idea of using democratic processes to determine which norms or rules regarding privacy should be in use, how they should be governed, how the appropriateness of specific privacy rules should be evaluated, and by whom. As Sanfilippo et al. articulate:

Scholarly and political commitments to democratic decision-making in the governance of privacy takes us down the route of exploring connections to PD, and its democratic and political ideals, in particular. Some preliminary attempts in this direction are due to Reference Mir, Shvartzshnaider and LatoneroMir et al. (2018) and Reference Shilton, Burke, Estrin, Hansen and SrivastavaShilton et al. (2008). Yet, at the time of writing this chapter, there is almost no work on operationalizing PD to conceptualize privacy. There is much important work to be done in this direction, such as determining which privacy rules-in-use in specific contexts are normatively appropriate, what the characteristics of the community are that determine these rules-in-use, how communities and other stakeholders, particularly dynamic ones, can negotiate around conflicting values such as privacy. In this section, I examine the affordances of PD to speak to such concerns.

While PD processes have largely been absent both in the shaping of privacy policy and in exploring contested aspects of privacy, privacy scholarship can learn and adapt from the vast body of literature that does envision using participatory, democratic processes in shaping and determining aspects of public policy. Such adaptations are especially pertinent in cases where technology (including potentially privacy-invasive technology) is employed within contexts that are democratic by their very nature, such as several decision-making processes employed by states, cities, municipalities, and public services, a context that is often dubbed as “civic tech.” In such contexts, participants’ relationship to the technology in question is more appropriately framed as that of a citizen rather than a consumer. For example, Reference PilemalmPilemalm (2018) studies the role of PD in public sector contexts, including civic engagement and “we-government” initiatives. He presents case studies showing that after addressing the challenges and practical difficulties of involving civil citizens, PD can be employed in the design of technologies in the public sector and lead to empowerment of citizens involved by both including them in designing the products that impact them and enhancing their understanding and skills.

In particular, the democratic framing of PD harkening back to its historical roots had led several PD researchers and practitioners to view PD as a process that interrogates issues of power and politics with the ultimate aim of enhancing democratic ideals, mutual learning and empowerment of the participants (Reference EhnEhn 1988). While PD flourished as a practice and value-based design system (Reference ShiltonShilton 2018) in the context of unionized workers in the Scandinavian workplace, the changing nature of work organizations and the adoption of PD outside Scandinavia led to the adoption of PD beyond the workplace. In particular Reference Teli, Lyle and SciannambloTeli et al. ( 2018) remark that the adoption of PD in the early 2000s extended beyond the “renewed workplace” – workplaces they term as arising out of “transformations in the mode of production toward post-Fordism” – to domains considered to be constituting the “public realm” (Reference Huybrechts, Benesch and GeibHuybrechts, Benesch, and Geib 2017). This expression continues in what Reference DiSalvo, Clement and PipekDiSalvo et al. (2012) call community-based PD, where the participants are not workers, but rather citizens interested in community-related issues, and the context involves negotiations among multiple parties with heterogeneous, and often conflicting values (Reference Grönvall, Malmborg and MesseterGrönvall, Malmborg, and Messeter 2016). As Grönvall and coauthors remark, in such settings:

Grönvall et al. present three case studies to demonstrate how design interventions enable the participants to become aware of other participant’s attitudes toward the collaboration at hand as well as their values. The case studies illustrate how even as PD as a process can enable a consensus and an understanding, the dynamic nature of the participant population leads to a continuously changing landscape of values as each participant brings in their own roles, stances, and values into these collaborations. They remark that:

Reference Lodato and CarlLodato and DiSalvo (2018) consider PD in the context of institutions operating in the public realm, examining the constraints produced through employing PD in working with or through these institutions – what they call “institutional constraints,” and are ultimately interested in understanding such institutions through the lens of PD.

PD, when employed in the so-called public realm, raises questions about who the participants are, who is considered to be part of the community, how those boundaries are drawn, and who is left out of the “participation.” For example, Lodato and DiSalvo claim that:

Since PD aims to enhance democratic decision-making, mutual learning between designers and participants, and empowerment of participants, Reference Bossen, Dindler and IversenBossen et al. (2016) consider the question of evaluating whether PD processes indeed achieve these goals. They present a framework to systematically evaluate PD projects for these goals paying attention to the purpose of the evaluation, who conducts and leads the evaluation, who participates, the methods used, and the audience for the evaluation. These criteria help understand questions of participation, legitimacy, and empowerment in PD.

There is some literature on the commonalities between Commons Design and Participatory Design; here I briefly review that literature to explore ideas pertinent to the design of a privacy commons. Reference Marttila, Botero and Saad-SulonenMarttila et al. (2014) examine the connections between the literature on commons (for example, using Ostrom’s framework (Reference OstromOstrom 1990)) and PD, with the aim of developing design strategies and approaches to designing the commons. They argue that both PD and the commons literatures “build upon stakeholders and communities’ capabilities and right to act and decide upon their future.” They point out how while Ostrom’s “design principles”(Reference OstromOstrom 1990) for long-enduring commons were not intended to provide a framework to design a commons, nevertheless, they can be integrated in the PD process “to develop a nuanced understanding of design agency and its interplay with multiple mechanisms of collective action” (Reference Marttila, Botero and Saad-SulonenMarttila, Botero, and Saad-Sulonen 2014).

Such orientations are also available (and arguably, direly needed) for the conceptualizations and implementations of privacy. However, such engagements open up questions about efficiency of processes, and scalability of solutions, two framings that technologists are particularly attuned to.

In his book titled the “Smart Enough City” (Reference GreenGreen 2019), Ben Green presents an example that instead works with an alternative concept: “meaningful inefficiencies” that he borrows from civic media scholars (Reference Gordon and WalterGordon and Walter 2016). Green cites work by Gordon and coauthors (Reference Gordon and Baldwin-PhilippiGordon and Baldwin-Philippi 2014) to create Community PlanIt (CPI),Footnote ¹ an online, multiplayer game to promote engagement, deliberation, and decision-making within communities. The game is focused not on making the process of deliberation and engagement efficient, but rather to recognize that these are necessarily inefficient processes, and to design such platforms for “meaningful inefficiencies” that highlight aspects of community member engagement, coordination, and reflection:

Could community engagement platforms that are designed to enhance civic engagement and are embedded appropriately in the civic, social, and cultural contexts of communities, such as Community PlanIt, be deployed to develop models of participatory governance of information norms? This question is inextricably linked to the larger goals of PD – that of enhancing democratic ideals, mutual learning and empowerment of the participants. The next section will delve into some of the literature on “civic learning” and reflective decision-making that enables participants to negotiate around and make collective decisions about issues impacting them.

10.4.3 Privacy Literacy, Civic Leaning, and Participatory Governance

Questions of participation in mechanisms of governance lead to underlying questions about people’s understanding of the information flow landscape, their perception of their roles in it, and what kinds of coordination and deliberation mechanisms enable people to engage meaningfully in such participatory frameworks. In relation to the GKC framework, “adequate” privacy literacy may be viewed as “attributes of the community members” (Reference Strandburg, Frischmann, Madison, Strandburg, Frischmann and MadisonStrandburg, Frischmann, and Madison 2017). Community members can effectively govern the privacy commons only when they understand the underlying information flows and consequences of appropriate and inappropriate flows.

An important question that such considerations raise is: What kinds of (pedagogical) tools can be used to enhance people’s understanding of the data ecosystem and its implications? As Regan outlines, “the goal here would be to make visible the privacy implications which to date have effectively remained invisible to those affected” (Reference ReganP. Regan 2016). Here, Reference KumarKumar (2018) offers some preliminary research directions by outlining the possibility of using CI as an educational tool. This stems from an earlier study Kumar conducted with her co-authors (Reference Kumar, Naik, Devkar, Chetty, Clegg and VitakKumar et al. 2017), where CI was used as an analytical tool to understand how children used digital devices and how they both understood and navigated privacy concerns online. The study provided evidence that children (especially over ten) largely understand how the parameters of CI affect norms of information flow, and in particular, they had an understanding of actors and attributes, even as they don’t use the same terminology. Based on this, Kumar suggests exploring CI as a tool for privacy education (Reference KumarKumar 2018). In related studies, Reference Martin and NissenbaumMartin and Nissenbaum (2015) use survey-based methods to show that people typically understand the parameters of an informational norm, and frame their privacy expectations in view of the context in which the information flow occurs, as well as how the information is transmitted and used, and who the senders and receivers of this information are (Reference MartinMartin 2012).

While Kumar is largely interested in privacy literacy for children, with the objective of equipping children to make better decisions about their privacy, a larger additional question worth examining would be to understand whether and how CI can be used as an educational tool to equip adults (and, potentially, children) to better understand information flows within a larger governance context.

Much work in the privacy literacy space has focused on the understanding and empowerment of individual actors with respect to their privacy – another place where individualistic, subject-centered notions of privacy have gained traction. As Park notes:

However, as Reference CohenCohen (2019) argues, to consider effective responses to the erosion of privacy, scholarship and practice needs to shift from “subject-centered” to “condition-centered” frameworks. In this vein, literacy can also be broadly conceptualized as the building of capacity for an individual to act in a deliberative democratic system, a direction that remains under-explored in studies of privacy literacy. Reference Gordon and Baldwin-PhilippiGordon and Baldwin-Phillipi (2014) call this “civic learning”. They present two case studies, in which the online game Community PlanIt (CPI) was deployed in a community to enhance civic-engagement with support from local community organizations. One was part of a district wide planning process in the Boston Public Schools and the second as part of a master planning process in Detroit, Michigan. On assessing the impact of CPI in both case studies, they concluded that the gaming platform allowed what they term as “civic learning” to occur. This has important implications for privacy governance and privacy literacy: what kinds of tools and systems can help build individuals’ capacities as engaged, informed, and empowered citizens in the governance of privacy rules?

10.4.4 Empirical Studies of Privacy Norms and Their Relation to Individuals’ Expectations and Preferences

A focus on procedural legitimacy of informational norms raises another related important question: how can community members’ expectations and preferences of privacy be used to assess the legitimacy of contextual informational norms?

This calls for ways of empirically studying such expectations and preferences, not merely at an individual level, but at a group level. In prior work (Reference Shvartzshnaider, Tong, Wies, Kift, Nissenbaum, Subramanian and MittalShvartzshnaider et al. 2016) survey-based methods were used to measure users’ expectations and preferences of privacy to determine whether or not specific information flows are appropriate. However, as Benthall at al. outline:

Since the GKC approach seeks to further direct attention from the individual, an important research direction is to explore how individuals’ understanding, expectations, and preferences regarding privacy change in a group setting, and how such changes reflect on the larger governance procedures, particularly when these processes are democratic and participatory in nature?

In her articulation of privacy as a Common Good (P. M. Reference ReganRegan 2002; Reference Regan, Roessler and Mokrosinska2015), Regan raises an important and nuanced point to differentiate between “groups” and “individuals in a group” as a unit of analysis. She also poses the question of probing how individuals in groups differ from individuals acting individually in regards to privacy, highlighting that focusing on individuals who act and are aware of their actions and experiences as members of a group rather than merely as individuals acting in isolated capacities will aid our understanding of privacy behaviors and consequent “privacy actions and inactions.” A consequent key problem Regan identifies is to create avenues to help individuals realize that they are not merely individuals but members of a group both being impacted by the actions of others in the privacy dimension and affecting other people’s privacy. This has close connections to the idea of civic learning explored in the previous section. She recommends drawing on the work of sociologists, social psychologists, and communication scholars who study individual behavior in groups. This line of investigation is also open and available to computer science researchers, particularly those in HCI.

10.4.5 Calibrating Norm Evaluation and Enforcement Engines for Dynamic Sources of Norms

Technical systems that implement CI usually express informational norms in formal systems, and operationalize these norms on information flows that act on specific data exchange between actors in a particular context. Such systems typically rely on norm evaluation and enforcement engines that check whether the information flows are consistent with the supplied norms (Reference Barth, Datta, Mitchell and NissenbaumBarth et al. 2006; Reference Chowdhury, Gampe, Niu, von Ronne, Bennatt, Datta, Jia and WinsboroughChowdhury et al. 2013). An important research consideration that the governance perspective raises is related to the design and architecture of CI norm evaluation and enforcement engines (along with accompanying human–computer interfaces) that are more suited for dynamic deliberative sources of these norms rather than static sources such as laws and policies, as has been the case in prior work (Reference Barth, Datta, Mitchell and NissenbaumBarth et al. 2006).

Reference Shvartzshanider, Balashankar, Wies and SubramanianShvartzshanider et al. (2018) provide important directions here – they use natural language processing techniques such as dependency parsing to automatically extract the parameters of CI from individual sentences. Their approach extracts the CI norm parameters based on the syntactic structure of a single sentence, and uses an accompanying reading comprehension model to incorporate a semantic understanding of the larger scope in order to incorporate it into the CI parameters. They apply their techniques on a corpus that contains website privacy policies in natural text alongside annotations by law students. By supplementing this process with crowdsourcing, they demonstrate that information flows can be automatically extracted from natural text and can be made more precise by appropriate crowdsourcing techniques. While they use a corpus of website privacy policies for this purpose, an open direction is to use natural language processing to infer the parameters of privacy norms from privacy policies generated in a more participatory setting.

10.4.6 Normative Considerations in Differential Privacy

Contextual Integrity could provide a normative framework to embed technical notions such as differential privacy within it (Reference DworkDwork 2006). To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no existing work that considers the appropriateness (or not) of releasing specific functions of a database from the perspective of CI. The GKC framework could further engage with these questions of appropriateness by considering aspects of governance of these rules of appropriateness.

Differential privacy (DP) is primarily suitable for settings where there is interest in releasing an aggregate function of a dataset consisting of data from individuals. This could include simple functions such as averages or more complex machine learning predictors. As Dwork and Roth state:

This is a more intuitive explanation of an underlying mathematical guarantee of plausible deniability, modulated by a privacy parameter, that has been called epsilon in the literature (Reference DworkDwork 2006; Reference Dwork and RothDwork and Roth 2013). For a detailed non-technical discussion of differential privacy consult Reference Wood, Altman, Bembenek, Bun, Gaboardi, Honaker, Nissim, O’Brien, Steinke and VadhanWood et al.’s (2018) primer.

Even though the DP guarantee targets individuals, functions that could be potentially publicly released or shared are computed over a dataset consisting of several individuals. Such a guarantee might, therefore, be meaningful to examine within the context of community governance and deliberation about sharing of data or functions of data more widely. For example, access to information that furthers understanding of medical ailments has a different normative valence than that of aggregation and prediction for commercial purposes such as online advertising and applications that might intentionally or unintentionally enact discrimination. Communities are likely to evaluate the appropriateness of sharing aggregate functions for these two purposes in different ways. For example, many polls indicate that the public views sharing of personal health data with researchers to be different from sharing such data with other more commercializing applications, indicating the need for context-specific attention to such details. On surveying personally controlled health records (PCHRs) users, Weitzman et al. found that 91 percent were willing to share medical information for health research with such willingness “conditioned by anonymity, research use, engagement with a trusted intermediary, transparency around PCHR access and use, and payment” (Reference Weitzman, Kaci and MandlWeitzman, Kaci, and Mandl 2010). In survey-based research conducted at the Pew Center, Reference Madden and RainieMadden and Rainie (2015) found that only 76 percent of respondents say they are “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that data on their online activity held by the online advertisers who place ads on the websites they visit will remain private and secure.

If sharing data at an aggregate level for, say, medical research purposes is deemed to be appropriate, DP can be employed within a governance framework to achieve the guarantee of plausible deniability for individual community members, and to consider questions about what are appropriate aggregate functions that should be shared with people outside the community. By paying attention to the larger normative elements of the use, purpose, and politics of aggregation, DP can be a powerful and effective tool to disrupt what Cohen terms “semantic continuity” (Reference CohenCohen 2019).

Several other research directions open up when we consider embedding DP within the larger normative elements of the commons framework: what kinds of interfaces will enable citizens (without a deep mathematical background) to understand the larger guarantees of DP, and make good governance decisions? Reference Bullek, Garboski, Mir and PeckBullek et al.’s (2017) preliminary work on making the core guarantees of DP understandable and accessible to the larger public provides one step in this direction. Further research that examines groups as units of analysis, rather than only individuals, along with considering contextual dimensions of the settings in which communities might want to share aggregate data, is needed here.

Voice-shaped Commons Governance

In the voice-shaped governance pattern, those creating and using knowledge resources are also responsible for their governance. The success of voice-shaped commons arrangements depends on governance that encourages reciprocal contribution for a mutually beneficial outcome. Chapters 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7 in this book describe cases characterized at least in significant part by voice-shaped governance of personal information. In Chapters 2, 4 and 6 this voice-shaped governance is mostly informal, while Chapters 3 and 7 describe more formal governance structures. Cases exhibiting voice-shaped commons can be further characterized as illustrated in Table 11.1, which employs the distinctions based on source and use of personal information described above to categorize cases from this volume and from our earlier meta-analysis.

Table 11.1Voice-shaped commons breakdown

(Case studies in this volume are in bold)

As illustrated in the top row of Table 11.1, voice-shaped commons governance is sometimes applied to create and manage a pool of personal information as a resource. In the cases listed in the upper left quadrant, members participate in governance of knowledge resources created by pooling their own personal information. That quadrant includes medical commons in which patients or their representatives have a direct voice in commons governance, including the MIDATA case explored in Chapter 2 and earlier-studied RDCRN cases, the previously studied LINK Indigenous Knowledge Commons, in which representatives of indigenous groups participate in governing information resources that they view as intimately related to their communities, as well as some aspects of the Facebook activist groups explored in Chapter 5.

In the cases listed in the upper right quadrant, members govern knowledge resources they create by contributing other people’s personal information. In the previously studied medical cases in that quadrant, for example, patient information is governed by consortia of physicians and medical researchers without direct patient involvement. Similarly, in Chapter 4 of this volume, Jones and McCoy describe institutional research by university administrators using a pool of student personal information. Governance of the sharing and use of student information is largely voice-shaped, in that many of the rules-in-use are determined by university personnel who contribute and use the information. Crucially, however, the student information subjects are not members of this governing community.

The distinction is normatively significant. While members may have altruistic concerns for non-member information subjects or be bound, as in the medical and education contexts, by background legal or professional obligations to them, voice-shaped governance is no guarantee that the concerns of non-members will be adequately addressed. Indeed, the NIH included patient representatives as governing members in the Rare Disease Clinical Research Network as a condition of government funding following complaints that patient interests had not been sufficiently represented in earlier consortia made up entirely of physicians and researchers.

That said, governance without the direct participation of information subjects does not necessarily give members free rein to share and use other people’s personal information however they please. Personal health and education information, for example, is governed by applicable background privacy legislation, ethical rules and professional norms. Moreover, in some contexts commons members may be required to obtain the consent of information subjects before contributing their personal information to the pool. Consent, however, is not the same as participation in governance, a point we explore further below and in related work (Gorham et al.).

As illustrated in the bottom left quadrant of Table 11.1, voice-shaped commons governance may also be applied to collateral flows of members’ personal information that occur in conjunction with or as a by-product of creating some other sort of shared knowledge resource. Appropriate governance of such collateral flows of personal information can be important for encouraging participation, improving the quality of other sorts of knowledge resources the group creates and otherwise furthering the goals and objectives of voice-shaped commons governance. The cases in Chapter 7 by Frischmann et al. illustrate how constraints on the flow of members’ personal information to outsiders can incentivize diverse and open participation in creating other sorts of knowledge resources and improve their quality. Whether it is the Chatham House Rule’s incredibly simple prohibitionFootnote ¹ on revealing the identity or affiliation of speakers or the more elaborate confidentiality rules adopted by Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG), privacy governance fosters knowledge production and sharing by members. Madison’s Chapter 6 illustrates how informal norms against disclosing personal information in exchanges with other members created a venue for building a knowledge base through rational, scientific argument. The previously studied Patient Innovation Project similarly aims to create a pool of generalizable knowledge about medical innovations made by patients and caregivers, but personal information flows are an inevitable by-product of the sharing of innovations so intimately bound up with patients’ medical conditions. Though the Patient Innovation Project governs these collateral flows of personal information in part by platform design, as discussed in the next sub-section, sub-communities have also developed more tailored, voice-shaped information sharing norms. The bottom right quadrant of Table 11.1 is empty, perhaps because collateral flow of non-member personal information that is not being pooled into a shared resource is rare.

The Facebook activist groups studied in Chapter 5 are included in three of the four quadrants in Table 11.1 because of the variety of personal information-based resources involved and the various ways in which intentional and collateral personal information flows affected participation in these groups. We can describe the governance of these pooled personal information resources and collateral flows as voice-shaped to the extent that contributors either participated actively in creating the mostly informal rules-in-use that emerged or viewed themselves as adequately represented by the groups’ more actively involved leaders and organizers. Voice-shaped governance was only part of the story for these Facebook activist groups, however, as discussed in the sections on exit-shaped and imposed commons later.

In these cases, personal information was contributed directly to shared knowledge resources by those who posted personal narratives to the public Facebook pages, contributed photos, joined Facebook groups or signed up for events or email lists. These pooled knowledge resources were used to further the group’s objectives by informing and persuading the public, facilitating communication of information to members and so forth. While much of this personal information pertained to the contributors, these cases are included in both left and right quadrants of the top row because it was also possible to contribute personal information pertaining to someone else. Indeed, this sort of behaviour occurred often enough that groups developed mechanisms for protecting potentially vulnerable non-participants from such disclosures through rules-in-use. These cases thus illustrate not only the potential for information subjects to be left out of voice-shaped governance, but also the fact that voice-shaped governance may nonetheless incorporate protections for non-members.

The Facebook activist groups of Chapter 5 are also represented in the bottom left quadrant of Table 11.1 because they adopted rules-in-use governing collateral personal information flow arising, for example, from the metadata identifying those who posted to the Facebook pages and the interactions between organizers behind the scenes. In some ways, the various interactions between personal information and participation parallel patterns observed within the Patient Innovation Project, a previous case study. With respect to Patient Innovation, however, personal information as a resource or as collateral flows always pertained to members, rather than non-member information subjects.

Exit-shaped Commons Governance

Exit-shaped commons governance, as we identified in Chapter 1, occurs when an individual or group creates an infrastructure for voluntary public participation in creating a shared knowledge resource. It thus differs from voice-shaped governance in that contributors to the knowledge resource do not participate directly in its governance. The key characteristic that distinguishes exit-shaped commons governance from imposed governance is that contributions are meaningfully voluntary. As a result, whoever governs the shared knowledge resource must do so in a way that will attract participants.

The characteristics of personal information surface distinctions among cases of exit-shaped commons governance similar to those we observed for voice-shaped governance, as illustrated in Table 11.2.

Table 11.2Exit-shaped commons breakdown

(Case studies in this volume are in bold)

Before delving into the distinctions between cases in the different quadrants in Table 11.2, we focus on common features of exit-shaped commons governance. Most importantly, given that participation is meaningfully voluntary, designers of exit-shaped commons governance must ensure that potential participants will find it worth their while to contribute. As a result, even though contributors do not participate directly in governance, designers of exit-shaped commons cannot stray too far out of alignment with their interests. Trust is important. So, setting aside personal information for the moment, the need to attract participants means that the mental health chatbot must offer mental health assistance that, all things considered, is at least as attractive as alternatives. Galaxy Zoo and many online creation communities have adopted rules favouring non-commercial use of their (non-personal) knowledge resources, presumably because potential contributors find those policies attractive. More limited forms of democratic participation adopted by some online communities may have served similar purposes.

Turning more specifically to the exit-shaped commons governance of personal information, Table 11.2, like Table 11.1, lists cases aiming to create a pool of personal information in the top row and cases involving only personal information flow collateral to other sorts of activities in the bottom row.

The Woebot mental health chatbot described by Mattioli in Chapter 3 appears in the top left quadrant because it creates of pool of personal information contributed by patients as they use the app. By using a therapy chatbot, patients receive mental health assistance, while simultaneously contributing their personal health information to a knowledge pool that can be used by the app’s creators to improve its performance. Based on the analysis in Chapter 3, we categorize the governance of the personal information collected by the Woebot chatbot as exit-shaped. Governance of these personal information resources is not voice-shaped because it is physicians, not patients, who control the design of the app and the use of the associated personal information. Use of these chatbots, and the associated information pooling, does however currently appear to be meaningfully voluntary. Patients seem to have many viable alternative treatment options. Moreover, the chatbot’s physician designers appear to have transparently committed to using the resulting knowledge pool only for research purposes and to improve the app’s operation. It thus seems plausible that patients using the chatbot understand the ramifications of the chatbot’s collection of their personal information, because interesting rules-in-use operationalize this intent in ways that align with patient expectations.

We categorize the Facebook activist groups discussed in Chapter 5 under exit-shaped governance, as well as voice-shaped governance. Informal governance by trusted leaders is a recurring theme in knowledge commons governance. Nonetheless, participation in these movements was so broad that it is virtually inevitable that some participants – especially those who joined at a later stage – experienced the rules-in-use and governance as essentially ‘take it or leave it’. Like the more involved members discussed earlier, such participants could have posted personal information pertaining to themselves or to others. These groups were extremely successful in attracting large numbers of participants who contributed various sorts of personal information. While this success presumably reflects some satisfaction with the rules-in-use for personal information, later joining participants may not have viewed their choice to participate in these particular groups as entirely voluntary. As these groups became foci for expressing certain political views, their value undoubtedly rose relative to alternative protest avenues. This rich-get-richer phenomenon thus may have tipped the balance toward imposed governance, as discussed in the next sub-section.

The rules-in-use for collecting and employing personal information about users of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are largely determined by the commercial suppliers of ‘smart’ devices. The survey study by Shvartzshnaider et al., reported in Chapter 9, suggests that some device users have a sufficient understanding of the way that their personal information is collected and used by IoT companies that their decision to opt in by purchasing and using a given device or to opt out by not doing so are meaningfully voluntary. For this subset of users, the governance of IoT personal information resources may be categorized as exit-shaped and entered into the top left quadrant of Table 11.2. Notably, however, those users’ choices to opt in may also result in the collection of personal information from bystanders, guests and others who have made no such choice. We thus also categorize the IoT in the top right quadrant of Table 11.2. Much as for mental health chatbots, diminishing opportunities for meaningful exit amid pervasive surveillance environments oriented around IoT may disempower users, tipping governance from exit-shaped to imposed, as we will discuss in the next sub-section. On the other hand, one very interesting observation of the Shvartzshnaider et al. study is that online IoT forums allow users to pool their experiences and expertise to create knowledge resources about personal information collection by smart devices and strategies to mitigate it (at least to some degree). Those forums may thus empower consumers and expand the extent to which the governance of personal information resources collected through the IoT is exit-shaped.

The cases in the bottom row of Table 11.2 involve exit-shaped governance of collateral flows of personal information associated with the creation of other sorts of knowledge resources. Galaxy Zoo and the online creation community cases identified in our earlier meta-analysis both fall into this category. We observed in our earlier meta-analysis that those systems governed the collateral flow of personal information, at least in part, by allowing anonymous or pseudonymous participation. Nonetheless, though anonymity was the norm, participants were not discouraged from strategically revealing personal information on occasion in order to establish credibility or expertise. This set of rules presumably encouraged public participation by protecting participants from potentially negative effects of exposing their personal information publicly online while still allowing them to deploy it strategically in ways that benefitted them and may have improved the quality of the knowledge resource. The Patient Innovation Project similarly involves collateral flows of personal information intertwined with information about medical innovations developed by patients and caregivers, though its rules-in-use are different. Though sub-community governance is partially voice-shaped, as discussed above, much of the governance of personal information flows depends on platform design and is thus categorized as exit-shaped.

As noted in the previous section, the Facebook activist groups discussed in Chapter 5 also developed rules-in-use to govern collateral flows of personal information associated with the creation of other sorts of knowledge resources. To the extent those rules-in-use applied to contributors who were not adequately represented in governance, they also constitute exit-shaped commons governance.

Notably, all of the previously studied cases in Table 11.2 appear in the bottom row and involved the creation of general knowledge resources not comprised of personal information. These previously studied knowledge commons were also designed to make the knowledge resources they created openly available. For these earlier cases, the designation ‘public-driven’ may have been ambiguous, conflating openness to all willing contributors with public accessibility of the pooled information or public-generated data sets. The studies categorized in the top row of Table 11.2 clarify that there is a distinction. When we speak of exit-shaped commons governance, we mean openness regarding contributors.

We thus emphasize again the importance of meaningful voluntariness as the key characteristic of exit-shaped commons governance. If participation is not meaningfully voluntary, commons governance becomes imposed, rather than exit-shaped – a very different situation, which we discuss in the next section. Meaningful voluntariness means that potential contributors have meaningful alternatives as well as a sufficient grasp of the ramifications of contributing to the knowledge pool. Exit-shaped commons governance must therefore be designed to attract contributors in order to succeed. The need to attract contributors forces governance to attend sufficiently to participants’ interests. We do not, therefore, expect rules-in-use of open accessibility to emerge from exit-shaped commons governance of personal information pools because open availability would be likely to deter, rather than attract, potential contributors. In exit-shaped commons governance, rules-in-use regarding access to pooled resources are tools that designers can shape to attract participation. We would thus expect access rules to vary depending on the sorts of personal information involved and the goals and objectives of both potential participants and designers.

Of course, while meaningful voluntariness is the key to categorizing governance as exit-shaped, it is no guarantee of success. For example, one could imagine a version of the mental health chatbot that was completely transparent in its intentions to sell mental health information to advertisers or post it on the dark web. That sort of governance would be sufficiently voluntary to be classified as exit-shaped, but highly unlikely to attract enough participants to succeed.

Finally, it is important to note that while exit-shaped commons governance gives contributors some indirect influence over the rules-in-use, it does nothing to empower individuals whose personal information is contributed by others. Thus, cases in the upper right quadrant of Table 11.2 raise the same sorts of privacy concerns as cases in the upper right quadrant of Table 11.1. Just as members-driven governance may fail to attend to the interests of non-member information subjects, designers of exit-shaped governance may fail to attend to the interests of individuals whose personal information can be obtained without their participation.

Imposed Commons Governance

Imposed commons governance is similar to exit-shaped commons governance in that knowledge contributors do not have a voice in the rules-in-use that emerge, but differs significantly because contributors also do not opt for imposed governance in any meaningfully voluntary way. In other words, to the extent commons governance is imposed, contributors and information subjects alike lack both voice and the option to exit. While there is no bright line between voluntarily accepted and mandatory governance, one practical result is that imposed commons governance, unlike exit-shaped governance, need not be designed to attract participation. Thus, though designers might choose to take the interests and preferences of contributors into account, they need not do so.

Those with decision-making power over rules and governance are not always or necessarily the information subjects. Communities can include different membership groups and subgroups, and can rely on different existing infrastructures and technologies for collecting, processing and managing data. Governance associated with these infrastructure and external platforms are determined in design, by commercial interests, and through regulations, thus they will vary accordingly. Externally imposing commons governance requires power of some sort that effectively precludes contributors from opting out of participation. Such power may arise from various sources and can reside in either government or private hands.

One important source of power to impose commons governance over personal information is control and design of important infrastructure or other input resources needed to effectively create and manage the desired knowledge resources. This power is often associated with infrastructure because of network and similar effects that reduce the number of viable options. The Facebook activist groups study in Chapter 5 provides a good example of this source of privately imposed commons governance. Organizers repeatedly noted that they were displeased with certain aspects of Facebook’s platform design and treatment of contributors’ personal information. For these reasons, all three activist groups resorted to alternative means of communication for some purposes. Nonetheless, all concluded that they had no reasonable alternative to using Facebook as their central platform for communicating, aggregating and publicizing information. This example illustrates that complete market dominance is not required to empower a party to impose commons governance to some degree.

Another important source of imposed governance is the law, which is part of the background environment for every knowledge commons arrangement. (Of course, in a democracy, citizens ultimately create law, but on the time frame and scale of most knowledge commons goals and objectives, it is reasonable to treat legal requirements as mandatory and externally imposed.) Applicable law can be general or aimed more specifically at structuring and regulating the creation of particular knowledge resources. To create a useful categorization, we treat only the latter sorts of legal requirements as imposed commons governance. Thus, for example, while acknowledging the importance of HIPAA, and other health privacy laws, we do not classify every medical knowledge commons as involving imposed commons governance. We do, however, classify the specific government mandates of the previously studied Sentinel program as imposed governance. The power to impose governance through law is, of course, limited to governments. However, there are also parallels in corporate policies that, when imposed on employees and teams, are strictly enforced rules.

Commons governance may also be imposed through the power of the purse. For example, while medical researchers are not literally forced to accept government conditions on funding, such as those associated with the Rare Disease Clinical Research Network, their acceptance of those conditions is not meaningfully voluntary in the sense that matters for our categorization. While researchers could in principle rely entirely on other funding sources or choose a different occupation, the paucity of realistic alternatives empowers funding agencies to impose commons governance. Indeed, while there more often are viable funding alternatives in the private sector, large private funders may have similar power to impose governance in some arenas.

Collecting knowledge resources by surveillance is another way to elude voluntary exit and thus impose commons governance. Both governments and some sorts of private entities may be able to impose governance in this way. Many ‘smart city’ activities create knowledge resources through this sort of imposed governance. Private parties exercise this sort of power when they siphon off information that individuals contribute or generate while using their products or services for unrelated purposes. Internet giants such as Facebook and Google are notorious for pooling such information for purposes of targeting ads, but a universe of smaller ad-supported businesses also contribute to such pools. More recently, as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, the IoT provides a similar source of private power to impose commons governance. Governments can accomplish essentially the same sort of thing by mandating disclosure. The earlier case study of Congress provides an interesting example of the way that open government laws create this sort of imposed commons governance.

Commons governance can also be imposed through control or constraint over contributor participation. This source of power can be illustrated by a thought experiment based on the mental health chatbots studied in Chapter 3. Mattioli’s study suggests that patients’ contributions of personal health information by using the current version of Woebot are meaningfully voluntary. If, however, a mental health chatbot’s use were to be mandated or highly rewarded by insurance companies, its governance pattern would shift from exit-shaped to imposed.Footnote ² A less obvious example of this type of power comes from the Facebook activist group study. While there might initially be several different groups vying to organize a national protest movement, as time goes on potential participants will naturally value being a part of the largest group. At some point, this rich-get-richer effect can implicitly empower the most popular group to impose its rules-in-use on later joiners.

Finally, and in a somewhat different vein, power to impose commons governance can stem from a party’s ability to undermine contributor voluntariness by misleading individuals about the implications of contributing to a knowledge pool or using particular products or services. This concern has long been central to privacy discourse, especially in the private realm. Empirical studies have convinced many, if not most, privacy experts that privacy policies and similar forms of ‘notice and consent’ in the commercial context ordinarily do not suffice to ensure that participants understand the uses to which their personal information will be put. Facebook is only one prominent example of a company that has been repeatedly criticized in this regard. As another illustration, consider how the voluntariness of patients’ use of the mental health chatbot would be eroded if its pool of personal information came under the control of private parties who wanted to use to target advertising or for other reasons unrelated to improving mental health treatment. If the implications of such uses were inadequately understood by patients, the chatbot’s governance pattern might well shift from exit-shaped to imposed.

Table 11.3 lists cases that involve significant imposed governance. In most of these cases, imposed governance of some aspects of commons activity is layered with voice-shaped or exit-shaped governance of other aspects. The distinctions in Tables 11.1 and 11.2 based on information subjects’ role in governance and on whether pooling personal information is a knowledge commons objective are less salient for categorizing imposed governance in which both contributors and information subjects have neither voice nor the capacity to exit. Instead, the columns in Table 11.3 distinguish between cases in which governance is imposed by government and cases in which it is imposed by private actors, while the rows differentiate between rules-in-use associated with actors and knowledge resources, including contribution, access to, and use of personal information resources. Overall, though governments must balance many competing interests and are not immune to capture, one would expect government-imposed governance to be more responsive than privately imposed governance to the concerns of information subjects.

Table 11.3Imposed commons governance

With respect to imposed governance, it is also important to note that some of these cases highlighted efforts to contest these constraints, when they didn’t align with information subjects’ norms and values. Many of the efforts to create more representative rules-in-use or work arounds developed within existing knowledge commons, such as activists on Facebook (Chapter 5). Yet, occasionally, communities of information subjects emerged for the sole purpose of pooling knowledge about exit or obfuscation. For example, the formation of sub-communities of IoT users through online forums that wants to assert more control over the pools of user data generated through their use of smart devices. These users, rather than pooling personal information, create a knowledge resource aimed at supporting other users to more effectively decide whether or how to exit, as well as how to obfuscate the collection of personal information. In this sense, these forums allow information subjects, as actors, to cope with exogenously imposed governance by manufacturers, as well as publicly driven governance.

The Importance of Trust

Focusing on privacy and personal information flows reveals the extent to which the success of voice-shaped or exit-shaped commons governance depends on trust. Perhaps this is most obvious in thinking of cases involving voluntary contributions of personal information to create a knowledge resource. Whether commons governance is voice-shaped or exit-shaped, voluntary contribution must depend on establishing a degree of trust in the governing institutions. Without such trust, information subjects will either opt out or attempt to employ strategy to avoid full participation. Voice-shaped commons governance can create such trust by including information subjects as members. This is the approach taken by the Gordon Research Conferences, the BITAG, the MIDATA case and RDCRN consortia, for example. When a group decides to adopt the Chatham House Rule to govern a meeting, it creates an environment of trust. Exit-shaped commons governance must rely on other mechanisms to create trust. In the medical and education contexts, professional ethics are a potentially meaningful basis for trust. Trust might also be based in shared agendas and circumstances, as was likely the case for the informal governance of the Facebook activist groups. The studies in Chapters 6 and 7 illustrate the perhaps less obvious extent to which trust based on rules-in-use about personal information can be essential to the successful of knowledge commons resources that do not incorporate personal information. This effect suggests that mechanisms for creating and reinforcing trust may be of very broad relevance to knowledge commons governance far beyond the obvious purview of personal information-based resources.

The Contestability of Commons Governance Legitimacy

These privacy-focused studies draw attention to the role of privately imposed commons governance, especially through the design of commercial infrastructure. Previous GKC studies that have dealt with imposed commons governance have focused primarily on government mandates, while previous consideration of infrastructure has been mostly confined to the benign contributions of government actors or private commons entrepreneurs whose goals and objectives were mostly in line with those of contributors and affected parties. These cases also highlight the potentially contestable legitimacy of commons governance of all three sorts and call out for more study of where and when commons governance is socially problematic and how communities respond to illegitimate governance. The issue of legitimacy also demands further attention, of the sort reflected in Chapters 8 through 10 of this volume, to policy approaches for improving the situation.

While GKC theory has always acknowledged the possibility that commons governance will fail to serve the goals and values of the larger society, previous studies have focused primarily on the extent to which a given knowledge commons achieved the objectives of its members and participants. Concerns about social impact focused mainly on the extent to which the resources created by a knowledge commons community would be shared for the benefit of the larger society. These privacy commons studies help to clarify the ways in which knowledge commons governance can fail to be legitimate from a social perspective. They underscore the possibility that knowledge commons governance can be illegitimate and socially problematic even if a pooled knowledge resource is successfully created. This sort of governance failure demands solutions that go beyond overcoming barriers to cooperation. Various types of solutions can be explored, including the development of appropriate regime complexes discussed by Shackelford in Chapter 8, the participatory design approach discussed by Mir in Chapter 9, to the collaborative development of self-help strategies illustrated by the IoT forums discussed in Chapter 10, the imposition of funding requirements giving information subjects a direct voice in governance illustrated by the RDRCN, the development of privacy-protective technologies and infrastructures, and the imposition of more effective government regulation.

Co-emergence of Communities and Knowledge Resources

One of the important differences between the IAD and GKC frameworks is the recognition that knowledge creation communities and knowledge resources may co-emerge, with each affecting the character of the other. The privacy commons studies provide valuable illustrations of this general feature of knowledge commons, particularly in voice-shaped and some exit-shaped situations. In some cases, this co-emergence occurs because at least some participants are subjects of personal information that is pooled to create a knowledge resource. This sort of relationship was identified in earlier RDCRN case studies and is a notable feature of cases discussed in Chapters 2, 3 and 5. The Gordon Research Conferences and BITAG examples from Chapter 5 are perfect examples. Even when the knowledge resource ultimately created by the community does not contain personal information, however, participants’ personal perspectives or experiences may be essential inputs that shape the knowledge resources that are ultimately created, as illustrated by the case studies discussed in Chapter 7 and in the earlier study of the Patient Innovation Project.

Knowledge Commons May Confront Diverse Obstacles or Social Dilemmas, Many of Which are Not Well Described or Reducible to the Simple Free Rider Dilemma

When we developed the GKC framework more than ten years ago, our focus was on challenging the simplistic view that the primary obstacle to knowledge creation was the free rider dilemma, which had to be solved by intellectual property or government subsidy. We were directly inspired by Ostrom’s demonstration that private property and government regulation are not the sole solutions to the so-called tragedy of the commons for natural resources. It became immediately clear from our early case studies, however, not only that there were collective solutions to the free rider problem for knowledge production, but that successful commons governance often confronted and overcame many other sorts of social dilemmas. Moreover, these other obstacles and dilemmas were often more important to successful knowledge creation and completely unaddressed by intellectual property regimes. Considering privacy and personal information confirms this observation and adds some new twists.

Among the dilemmas identified in the earlier GKC studies, the privacy-focused studies in this volume call particular attention to:

• Dilemmas attributable to the nature of the knowledge or information production problem.

As we have already emphasized, personal information flow and collection creates unique dilemmas because of the special connection between the information and its subjects, who may or may not have an adequate role in commons governance.

• Dilemmas arising from the interdependence among different constituencies of the knowledge commons.

When personal information is involved, these sorts of dilemmas reappear in familiar guises, but also with respect to particular concerns about the role of information subjects in governance.

• Dilemmas arising from (or mitigated by) the broader systems within which a knowledge commons is nested or embedded.

On the one hand, accounting for personal information highlights the important (though often incomplete) role that background law and professional ethics play in mitigating problems that arise from the lack of representation of information subjects’ interests in commons governance. On the other hand, it draws attention to the ways in which infrastructure design, especially when driven by commercial interests, can create governance dilemmas related to that lack of representation.

• Dilemmas associated with boundary management

The studies in this volume identify the important role that privacy governance can play in governing participation and managing access boundaries for knowledge commons, often even when the relevant knowledge resources are not comprised of personal information.

Close Relationships Often Exist between Knowledge Commons and Shared Infrastructure

Earlier GKC case studies noted the important role that the existence or creation of shared infrastructure often played in encouraging knowledge sharing by reducing transaction costs. In those earlier studies, when infrastructure was not created collaboratively, it was often essentially donated by governments or ‘commons entrepreneurs’ whose goals and objectives were closely aligned with those of the broader commons community. While some studies of privacy commons also identify this sort of ‘friendly’ infrastructure, their most important contribution is to identify problems that arise when infrastructure owners have interests that conflict with the interests of information subjects. This sort of ‘adversarial infrastructure’ is often created by commercial entities and closely associated with the emergence of imposed commons governance. Undoubtedly, there are times when society’s values are best served by embedding and imposing governance within infrastructure in order to constrain some knowledge commons from emerging, in competition with sub-communities’ preferences; in these cases infrastructure operationalizes rules to prevent certain resources from being pooled or disseminated, such as by white supremacists or for terrorism, or the emergence of rules-in-use to prevent social harms, such as pornography. There is a special danger, however, that society’s values will not be reflected in private infrastructure that takes on the role of imposing commons governance, as many of the privacy commons studies illustrate.

Knowledge Commons Governance Often Did Not Depend on One Strong Type or Source of Individual Motivations for Cooperation

Earlier GKC case studies largely presumed that contributing to a knowledge commons was largely, if not entirely, a voluntary activity and that commons governance had to concern itself with tapping into, or supplying, the varying motivations required to attract the cooperation of a sometimes diverse group of necessary participants. Privacy commons studies turn this theme on its head by emphasizing the role of involuntary – perhaps even coerced – contribution. Thus, a given individual’s personal information can sometimes be contributed by others, obtained by surveillance or gleaned from other behaviour that would be difficult or costly to avoid. This possibility raises important questions about the legitimacy of commons governance that were not a central focus of earlier GKC case studies.