Many Faces of Privacy: The Role of Perceived Privacy in Digital Autocracy
Speaker: Genia Kostka, Professor of Chinese Politics, Freie Universität Berlin
Moderator: Junyan Jiang, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Columbia University
Digital revolution is changing the nature of privacy and reshaping its meaning across political regimes. While privacy is typically regarded as a core value of modern liberal democracies and as such, an integral part of fundamental rights of democratic citizenry, its role in an autocratic political system undergirded by digital political control remains less clear. Professor Kostka will talk about her recent research, which employs a two-step design based on a survey experiment in China (N=4507) to study the various meanings of privacy as perceived by people living in a digital autocracy and the role of the different privacy attitudes they hold. Their experimental evidence suggests that people’s privacy attitudes are relatively stable and remain consistent. Furthermore, different privacy attitudes moderate the effect of digital control on people’s emotions and political attitudes in different ways. Most notably, while knowing about digital control decreases positive emotions, increases negative emotions, and worsens people’s political attitudes in general, there are surprisingly oppositive effects among people with trade-offism, fatalism and nothing-to-hide attitudes towards privacy, whereas the effect remain consistent among people who take measures to protect their privacy. Overall, these empirical findings contribute to nuanced understandings about the evolving nature of privacy embedded in a context characterized by digital political control and autocracy.
This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and co-sponsored by China and the World Program.
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