Shed Light on Unconscious Disclosure and Consumption of Information in the Digital Age

The technological evolution of computers, their networking, and the digitization of information revolutionized the exchange of information fundamentally. Nowadays, almost anyone can easily receive, create, modify and distribute information with almost unlimited reach. The resulting democratized flow of information and the elimination of spatial separation and temporal boundaries enabled a bunch of new
possibilities for individuals and societies. However, like any preceding upheaval in human communication, these changes cause also new challenges and issues that must be learned to deal with. On one hand, the unlimited amount of digital information available and the simultaneous creation and dissemination of misleading, false, influencing, and malicious content makes it difficult to assess and verify the credibility of received information. The impacts of such malicious information range from serious issues for individuals to societies. On the other hand, the interactive way of digital information exchange discloses a lot of (privacy-sensitive) information about the user. Information collected and analyzed is used to provide services, personalize information flows, or even to detect and prevent the spread of malicious
... mehr
information and behavior. However, the path between new achievements, safety, and freedom is very narrow. Today’s digital information exchange can simultaneously be used for global surveillance of individuals on an unprecedented scale. In the worst case, complete surveillance leads to repression of minorities and unwelcome opinions as well as the establishment of self-censorship, and thus undermines freedom of speech an essential human right and the foundation of modern democracies. Overall, digital
information exchange enabled surveillance and manipulation at a low cost. The best solution to these problems would, of course, be systematic prevention. Basically, however, systemic measures of both problems are opposed to each other. The more data is disclosed, the more possible surveillance; the less, the less control over shared information. Hence, in practice, new and old technological developments and their systemic measures are always subject to negotiation processes between safety, freedom, and utility.
Thus, existing systemic measures cannot completely protect users from the mentioned issues of digital information exchange. Transparency and education concerning the consumption and unconscious disclosure of digital information and thus increased awareness of end users is, therefore, an important supplement. On the one hand, to fill the gaps of systemic measures and, on the other hand, to empower users and societies to (co-)determine the negotiation processes themselves - and thus to counteract the new power asymmetries as well as to become part of the solution. This work aims to reveal such gaps for different use cases; to develop
transparency solutions for identified gaps; and to evaluate the impact and efficacy of developed solutions. First, we analyze how the traditional exchange of analog information has changed with digitization in terms of verification and unconscious disclosure of information, and develop a transparency tool for the exchange of analog printed documents. Afterward, we investigate the field of new digital developments, with a focus on the IoT. In particular, the integration of small sensors into any physical objects is increasingly blurring
the boundary between the digital and analog worlds, and let the information transfer disappear more and more unconsciously in the background. Thus, on one hand, we investigate in detail the change in mobility (connected driving) and, on the other hand, at the impact on bystanders who unconsciously disclose data through surrounding recording sensors without even being an active part of the system. For the latter, we additionally develop and evaluate a transparency solution. In the last part, we investigate the state of news
consumption in the German-speaking population and develop and evaluate a solution for contextualizing information to support the assessment of news in social networks.