Privacy: a review of publication trends

The huge growth in digital data and the commercialisation of personal information has brought privacy to the forefront of world legislation. The impact and growth of the Internet, digitisation of data, network connectivity and data sharing has required a number of new threats to be addressed. As the technological environment has expanded since the 1960's and the use of electronic commerce has become more ubiquitous, so the concern around privacy and personal information protection has increased. Privacy is important at various levels and allows people to develop their individuality apart from the groups to which they belong and offers them the ability to decide what face they want others to see. Based on the recent Snowden leaks there is currently a heightened interest in privacy and related issues worldwide. The IEEE Security & Privacy magazine is one of the leading publications devoted to privacy, providing articles with both a practical and research focus by leading thinkers within the security and privacy field. The magazine has a broad audience which includes practitioners, researchers and policy-makers. The objective of this paper is to provide a systematic review of how privacy has been reported in the magazine over the past decade. The paper examines the shifts of privacy within the information security domain, with particular interest to the past three years which have seen revisions and amendments in various national privacy policies. In addition to reviewing the magazine there is input from the magazine's current editor, who shares her views and insights on both the magazine and privacy in general. Findings show that over the period 2011-2013, privacy articles were predominantly driven by academic research, with the majority of security articles coming from within industry. There is little evidence that privacy has become a more dominant topicover the past ten years. While data loss and security breaches have escalated over the past decade the topic of privacy has taken second place to security.