ABSTRACT
PRISMS (PRIvacy and Security MirrorS) is a FP7 project that focuses on the so-called trade-off relationship between privacy and security. The most prominent vision is that security comes with a price, namely at the expense of privacy. One cannot have both, and being secure means that control needs to be exercised over one’s situation, often by third parties who thus need access to the private sphere of citizens. This trade-off thinking is however criticized from a number of perspectives (Solove 2008; Pavone et al. 2012). The criticism points at faulty assumptions that take stated preferences of respondents on face value while these conflict with actual behaviour (Ajzen 1991). It also criticizes the fundamental presupposition that seems to deny that it is factual impossible to have both. Trade-off thinking is a priori framed in a discourse that apparently rejects the possibility that security can be achieved without infringement on privacy (Hundt 2014). This framing endangers democratic society, putting the conditions for security above the conditions for living in a free and democratic society. The PRISMS Project has questioned this trade-off relationship by organizing a series of reflexive studies and by organizing a pan-European survey in which EU citizens have been asked how they perceive situations in which both privacy and security are addressed on equal footing. The reflexive studies showed how the political discourse on privacy and security inevitably – at least so it seems – considers privacy infringements to be legitimized by referring to the security threats that present-day society faces. The framing is solid, and is hardly questioned (Huijboom and Bodea 2015). An analysis of technological practices shows, on the basis of various cases, how technological practices are framed in security jargon while privacy is minimized as a potential technological asset (Braun et al. 2015).
