This thesis examines publicity exploitation in practice and the possible legal response of Scots law to that exploitation. It argues that the common law in Scotland is not capable of providing a coherent and principled right of publicity for individuals, and that a statutory right is instead required. By examining the nature of publicity exploitation and the activities that constitute publicity, it becomes clear that there are a number of different methods by which an individual’s “persona” – name, image, identity and reputation – can be used to enhance the goods and services of others, and that this enhancement is something for which other parties are willing to pay. The first part of this thesis explores publicity in practice, in order to derive a framework and vocabulary on which to build the subsequent legal analysis. One conclusion reached here is that, whereas much case law and academic commentary focuses on the unauthorised use of persona, authorised exploitation is more common and more lucrative for the individual. Both authorised and unauthorised use therefore need to be represented in a publicity right. The second part explores justifications for establishing a legal right to regulate the exploitation of publicity and to enable the control of such exploitation by the individual in question. These justifications reflect the dual interests at stake in publicity rights, being dignitarian interests in the use and control of one’s persona, and economic interests in the financial value of such use. The third part of the thesis draws upon the findings of the first two parts in order to assess the most appropriate legal classification of a right of publicity. The conclusion reached is that publicity cannot be sufficiently protected through established real rights or personal rights. Instead, the hybrid nature of publicity, comprising dignitarian and economic interests, should most appropriately be protected through a right in the nature of exclusive privilege (a concept already known in Scots law). This right is capable of enabling the necessary control of persona for the individual, subject to appropriate limitations to recognise the competing interests of other parties. These limits include freedom of expression and cultural communication. The final conclusion is that such a statutory right of exclusive privilege would be best placed to give principled and coherent effect to a right of publicity in Scots law.

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People make a range of everyday decisions about how and whether to share content with different people, across different platforms and services, during a variety of tasks. These sharing decisions can encompass complex preferences and a variety of access-control dimensions. In this thesis I examine potential methods for improving sharing mechanisms by better understanding the everyday online sharing environment and evaluating a potential sharing tool. I first present two studies that explore how current sharing mechanisms may fall short on social networking sites, leading to suboptimal outcomes such as regret or self censorship. I discuss the implications of these suboptimal outcomes for the design of behavioral nudging tools and the potential for improving the design of selective-sharing mechanisms. I then draw on a third study to explore the broader “ecosystem” of available channels created by the services and platforms people move between and combine to share content in everyday contexts. I examine the role of selective-sharing features in the broader audience-driven and task-driven dynamics that drive sharing decisions in this environment. I discuss the implications of channel choice and dynamics for the design of selective-sharing mechanisms. Using insights from current shortfalls and ecosystem-level dynamics I then present a fourth study examining the potential for adding topic-driven sharing mechanisms to Facebook. I use design mockups and a lab-based interview to explore participants’ hypothetical use cases for such mechanisms. I find that these mechanisms could potentially be useful in a variety of situations, but successful implementation would require accounting for privacy requirements and users’ sharing strategies.

The right to be let alone has been developing throughout history to offset the seemingly relentless encroachments by government in efforts to regulate "morality," and by governmental and/or business uses of technological advancements to control the individuals privacy. Thus, the espoused constitutional right of privacy has come to be the way for individuals (and groups) to stave off society's attempts to control or divert the individual from his right to be let alone. This work examines both state and federal court cases in an attempt to show that privacy has come to be a basic, constitutional right to be used against society's intrusions in areas of personal and sexual privacy.

Communications-related investigatory powers are ostensibly regulated within the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000, under the descriptive headings: 'interception of communications'; 'acquisition and disclosure of communications data' and 'investigation of data protected by encryption'. The scope, legality and extent of these hitherto infrequently examined powers experienced increased scrutiny following the controversial 2013 disclosures of fugitive United States National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, scrutiny generally founded on subjective conceptions of 'privacy', 'intrusiveness' or 'security'. This research however, adopts 'communications' as its conceptual common denominator. It comprehensively explores the separate politico-legal evolution of RIPA's communications-related investigatory powers, whilst identifying and critically analysing alternative statutory provisions that permit circumvention of RIPA's purported human rights-centric integrity. The detailed chronology provides conclusive evidence that current UK Secretaries of State and their executive agencies possess virtually unlimited communications-related information acquisition powers bequeathed by their predecessors. Perhaps more importantly, its simultaneous exposure of an executive culture of secrecy and deference to the UK's intelligence community assists in explaining why any fettering of the current powers will be so difficult to achieve. Drawing from Intelligence Studies, Information Science and Computer Science, this research logically deconstructs RIPA's communications-related powers, finding them more accurately describable as narrowly defined techniques facilitating the acquisition of communications-related data. Consequently, RIPA fails to envisage or regulate all types of acquisition, such as that obtained extra-jurisdictionally or via Computer Network Exploitation, thus partially legitimizing the status quo. The research also examines RIPA's seemingly all-encompassing definition of 'communication', finding it under-utilised, in that communications from the mind into electronic storage ('expression-related data') are not included. Consequently, the boundaries between 'communication', 'expression' and 'property,' and between RIPA's powers and those enabling Computer Network Exploitation are currently unnecessarily complicated. It concludes by recommending the enactment of a single statute regulating all investigative expression-related data acquisition.

Companies offering services on the Internet have led corporations to shift from the high cost of owning and maintaining stand-alone, privately-owned-and-operated infrastructure to a shared infrastructure model. These shared infrastructures are being offered by infrastructure service providers which have subscription, or pay-on-demand, charge models presenting compute and storage resources as a generalized utility. Utility based infrastructures that are run by service providers have been defined as "cloud computing" by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In the cloud computing model the concerns of security and privacy protections are exacerbated due to the requirement for an enterprise to allow third parties to own and manage the infrastructure and be custodians of the enterprises information. With this new architectural model, there are new hybrid governance models designed to support complex and uncertain environments. The cloud also requires a common infrastructure that integrates originally separate computing silos. Privacy and security policy awareness during provisioning and computing orchestration about data locality across domains and jurisdictions must be able to obey legal and regulatory constraints. Commercial use of the Internet for electronic commerce has been growing at a phenomenal rate while consumer concern has also risen about the information gathered about them. Concern about privacy of data has been rated as the number one barrier by all industries. The purpose of this dissertation is to perform an empirical study to determine if existing privacy assessment instruments adequately assess privacy risks when applied to cloud infrastructures. The methodology for determining this is to apply a specific set of privacy risk assessments against a three cloud environments. The assessments are run in the context of a typical web based application deployed against cloud providers that have the five key cloud tenets - on-demand/self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service.

This research examines the role of geospatial and ancillary technologies in the erosion of privacy in contemporary society. The development of Remote Sensing, GIS, and GPS technologies are explored as a means of understanding both their current and predicted uses and capabilities. Examination is also made of the legal basis and current status of privacy rights in the United States. Finally, current and predicted uses and capabilities of geospatial and ancillary technologies are critically examined in light of existing privacy protections as a means of determining the ways in which these technologies are impacting privacy currently and what their effects may be in the future.

This study tested a conceptual model of adolescents’ feelings of privacy invasion derived from CPM. Specifically, goals were to describe adolescents’ expectations of privacy, to describe how often adolescents are exposed to behaviors that threaten privacy, and to test privacy beliefs, potentially invasive behaviors, and having things to hide as predictors of individual differences in feelings of privacy invasion. Furthermore, each question and hypothesis was examined across four privacy domains and four relationships to determine whether privacy functions similarly or uniquely across domains and relationships. Participants were 118 adolescents (59% female), ranging from age 15 to 18 years of age (M age = 16.4 years, SD = .78). Results indicate that adolescents expect more privacy around their personal information than they expect around domains more aligned with parental monitoring. Sharing personal information elicited the greatest feelings of privacy invasion. The present study found some support the CPM based conceptual model. Adolescents expect information contained within the boundaries to remain private and intrusions into these boundaries elicit feelings of privacy invasion. Additionally, the current study found evidence to support the alternative model that the threat of discovery also elicits feelings of privacy invasion.

Smartphones continue to grow increasingly ubiquitous for a variety of reasons. This study employed an online survey experiment in order to determine whether perceptions of environmental/locational privacy or individual levels of self-monitoring have any effect on smartphone uses and gratifications. While perceptions of locational privacy did indeed have a modest effect on smartphone gratifications sought, self-monitoring did not, and no interactions were detected between locational privacy and self-monitoring. Implications for these findings as well as avenues for future research are discussed.

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