Identifying Critical Factors of Community Privacy

Just as an individual is rightly concerned about the privacy of their personally identifying information, so also is a group of people, a community, concerned about the privacy of sensitive information entrusted to their care. Our research seeks to better understand the factors contributing to the sensitivity of community information, the privacy threats that are recognized by the community, and the means by which the community attempts to fulfill their privacy responsibilities. We are also interested in seeing how the elements of a community privacy model which we developed are related to the findings from the studies of actual communities. This paper presents results from three focus group interviews conducted with participants from two information technology companies and one group from our university. In this paper we report how the studied communities acted to confine sensitive information. These studies capture the character and complexity of community privacy and expose breakdowns in current approaches. We also find significant relationship between these results and the key elements of our community privacy model.