The View from Above: Framing of Digital Privacy in Post Cambridge Analytica Congressional Hearings

How do policy and technological elites talk about privacy? Increasingly, researchers call for a multidimensional and contextual view of privacy as an object of study. Such calls have advanced both conceptual and empirical understanding of how citizens think about privacy and enact privacy-related behaviors in networked environments. At the same time, scandals such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) reveal gaps in perceptions of privacy held by the users vs. those in positions of power, who design and regulate information networks. Yet, studies of privacy perceptions of elites remain scarce. The current project contributes to filling this gap. Conceptually, our research builds on two main bodies of literature. First, we leverage research that distinguishes between vertical and horizontal dimensions of privacy. The former refers to privacy relationships of an individual vis-a-vis institutions, while the latter refers to privacy relationships vis-a-vis their peers. Previous studies suggest that information technology users prioritize horizontal thinking about privacy. Second, we build on framing literature, which suggests a link between frames in communication and frames in thought, as a way to systematically unpack elite discourses as representing their perceptions of privacy. Studies leveraging framing for privacy research suggest that internet policy deliberations harbor vertically oriented views of privacy. Empirically, we focus on US Congressional hearings following the CA scandal as a moment of explicit deliberation of privacy among policy and technological elites. We conduct a quantitative content analysis of the April 10, 2018 joint session of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee and Senate Committee on the Judiciary, where 44 Senators questioned a single witness - Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO). We develop and validate a dedicated coding scheme for the analysis of privacy discourses, and apply this scheme to systematically analyze 91 distinct interventions in the hearing. Our preliminary analysis suggests an overall dominance of vertical privacy framing, with institutions held responsible for both privacy infringement and privacy protection. While Mr. Zuckerberg had more references to horizontal privacy relationships among Facebook users, this behavior did not amount to statistically significant differences compared to the Senators. When taking into account the distance of privacy relationships, Republican Senators had significantly more references to primary relationships between Facebook and its users, while Democratic Senators focused on secondary information flows between Facebook and institutional third parties. Other emerging trends suggest that the Senators are more likely to view privacy as a right, compared to Mr. Zuckerberg. At the same time Republican Senators tend to view privacy more as a commodity compared to their Democratic counterparts. Currently, two main insights are emerging from this research. First, the dominance of vertical privacy framing in this elite discourse stands in stark contrast with earlier findings about the dominance of horizontal framing among the users of information technology. Second, it brings to surface the political nature of privacy as a vessel for normative perspectives and ideological positions. The full paper will draw a more nuanced picture of those dynamics, offering avenues for future research and policy considerations aimed at both designing and communicating privacy regulations.