Accounting for Privacy Pluralism: Lessons and Strategies from Community-Based Privacy Groups

The emergent, dynamic nature of privacy concerns in a shifting sociotechnical landscape creates a constant need for privacy-related resources and education. One response to this need is community-based privacy groups. We studied privacy groups that host meetings in diverse urban communities and interviewed the meeting organizers to see how they grapple with potentially varied and changeable privacy concerns. Our analysis identified three features of how privacy groups are organized to serve diverse constituencies: situating (finding the right venue for meetings), structuring (finding the right format/content for the meeting), and providing support (offering varied dimensions of assistance). We use these findings to inform a discussion of “privacy pluralism” as a perennial challenge for the HCI privacy research community, and we use the practices of privacy groups as an anchor for reflection on research practices.