Privacy ad Absurdum - How Workplace Privacy Dashboards Compromise Privacy

Abstract

In times of data-driven business, privacy and data protection are gaining importance. Users and legal bodies require the implementation of privacy-enhancing and transparencyenhancing technologies, such as privacy dashboards. Even though privacy dashboards contribute to privacy and data protection, they may also carry risks themselves. For example, privacy dashboards require access to and collection of quite a huge amount of personal data. This of course leads to a conflict with their primary goal—namely privacy, including data-minimization—and thus leads it ad absurdum. We particularly focus on privacy dashboards for employees as an example technology for transparency and self-determination at their workplace. Conflicts address among others transparency vs. data-minimization, and self-determination vs. social pressure. In this paper, we elaborate such conflicts and discuss corresponding solution strategies.