All issues > Volume 12 > Issue 12:1 (1-77)

More than ever the notion of control plays a pivotal and pervasive role in the discourses of privacy and data protection. Privacy scholarship and regulators propose to increase individual control over personal information as the ultimate prescriptive solution to tackle the issues raised by emergent data processing technologies. Conceived as “the claim of individuals to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others”, the notion of control is not new. It is often considered as the unique means of empowerment of the data subject. The mechanisms of this empowerment remain however surprisingly vague and understudied. What does it really mean to be in control of one’s data in the context of contemporary socio-technical environments and practices? What are the characteristics, purposes and potential limits of such control and how can we guarantee data subjects effective control over their own data? This paper undertakes an interdisciplinary review of the concept of “control” to explore such questions in the fields of law and computer science.

Cyberspace is changing the way we communicate, live and interact. Most significantly, it changes the nature of anonymous communication. In the physical world we all have a reasonable understanding of how anonymity can be achieved, but cyberspace was not designed to work the same way as real space. Machine communications contain information which identifies their originating machine, and internet service providers (ISPs), internet businesses and online social networks (OSN) can often identify users via the information that users disclose to them. As such, once users communicate online for the first time their anonymity starts to become compromised.Most discussions about anonymity assume that anonymity has some binary, on/off value. They ignore that the way we communicate has been changed by cyberspace; and also overlook the fact that even individual users are often able to identify someone by simply collecting and connecting the information available online. This means that users who freely decided to make information available online in a particular situation, where that information is available to the masses, cannot expect not to be named in another different situation.In the digital age, users are living in an anonymity limbo where they may not yet be named but can potentially become so at any time. As such, it seems inevitable that this new reality around anonymity will have implications on the two concepts often linked to it: autonomy and consent.