Distinguishing Group Privacy From Personal Privacy: The Effect of Group Inference Technologies on Privacy Perceptions and Behaviors

Machine learning and data mining threaten personal privacy, and many tools exist to help users protect their privacy (e.g., available privacy settings on Facebook, anonymization and encryption of personal data, etc.). But such technologies also pose threats to "group privacy," which is a concept scholars know relatively little about. Moreover, there are few tools to address the problem of protecting group privacy. This paper discusses an emerging class of software applications and services that pose new risks to group privacy by revealing group-level information based on individual information, such as social media postings or fitness app usage. The paper describes the results of two experiments that empirically establish the concept of group privacy and shows that it affects user perceptions of and interactions with information technology. The findings serve as a call to developers to design tools for group privacy protection.