Andrew McStay - Privacy and the Media

Privacy and the Media is a thoughtful survey of the privacy landscape. McStay reviews the intricate tensions and seeming contradictions to offer an accessible book for anyone curious about the contemporary debates in privacy.

danah boyd, founder of Data & Society

The only book that addresses the full spectrum of the innovation-privacy dynamic, ranging from advertising to intelligence to wearables. It is timely and necessary; essential reading.

Gus Hosein, Privacy International

McStays great achievement here is to confront many of the pertinent and complex questions about media and privacy in a style that is both authoritative and easy to read. He provides an excellent overview of the perennial debates and considers the implications on privacy of an increasingly data-driven media environment. His book will prove an excellent companion for all students of this fascinating and crucial topic.

Mireille Hildebrandt, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

This pleasingly accessible book tackles all the major questions that arise in a world whose lifeblood is our personal information: liberty, choice, transparency, control. McStay argues that privacy is not about isolation, going off-grid or being a digital hermit. Rather, it is about managing our online lives and controlling how much others know about us. This book persuades me more than ever that privacy is a branch of ethics; it is concerned with the age-old relationship between the self and the other. It will serve as a great introduction to informational privacy, not just for media studies students and privacy lawyers, but for any information rights professional needing a deeper understanding of the subject.

Iain Bourne, Information Commissioners Office

Clearly and accessibly written, this book is a great resource for anyone interested in the broad range of ways in which privacy and contemporary media are entangled and in the big picture of privacy-media relations today. It challenges us to take privacy seriously as a media and mediation issue. I will definitely be assigning it for my students.

Helen Kennedy, University of Sheffield

In this book, Privacy and the Media, we will consider the nature of privacy and its relationships with modern media and networked communication. The aim is to use ideas about privacy to better understand the modern media environment, but also that through close assessment of media, organisations, technologies and peoples uses of media, we will develop a better understanding of privacy. This is a purposefully varied book that examines journalism, the Snowden leaks, encryption, platforms such as Google, advertising, big data and machine learning, technologies sensitive to emotions, wearable body-trackers, and social media and sexting. The diversity of privacy matters in society today leads me to argue that, among a multitude of competing interests, privacy may very well be the critical topic of media and society today.

There are thousands of journal papers that address privacy, and many books that touch upon it, but there are far fewer books written in an accessible manner dedicated to privacy and media itself. Those on privacy and media come from the law subject area and, while important, miss many dimensions and theoretical perspectives of interest to the media studies subject area. This book will act as a corrective to this, providing readers with a solid understanding of the importance of privacy, how we can understand it and how it figures within contemporary media culture. My intention in writing this book has been to depict the assorted relationships between privacy and media and it is by this breadth it should be judged. Specialist scholars in any of the individual topics dealt may feel that I have not provided enough detail or sophistication. This is inevitable in a book such as this and to that reader I suggest a swim in unusual waters and immersion in the more unfamiliar topics within this book.

If we recollect that media studies is typically interested in the history and effects of media content and technology, the need for such a book becomes clear. Indeed, perhaps the most significant change in the last twenty-five years or so to media technologies is how corporations and other organisations now make extensive use of data about us. This invites all sorts of questions germane to media studies, not least about how content is formed, economics, history, influence, organisations, policies, power, technologies, and how people use media in specific situations and contexts. This latter point is important in that unlike other disciplines that examine technologies, media studies is very interested in how media facilitates and integrates into everyday life, and how emergent communications technologies mediate it. To this end, this book employs an expansive understanding of media based on the idea that while very much connected to devices and content, what is increasingly important to understand is how information about ourselves and the lives of others is collected, transmitted, processed and, indeed, mediated.