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This paper critiques the over-reliance on GDPR as the primary framework for digital privacy research, arguing it overlooks the diverse privacy concerns of users in other locales. They propose a unified abstraction that normalizes the heterogeneous legal requirements of multiple global data protection laws, aligned with the data lifecycle. The authors then analyze the implications of these diverse laws on users, organizations, and governments, advocating for a broader perspective in digital privacy research.
The digital privacy research community's Eurocentric focus is creating a blind spot that ignores the diverse privacy concerns and legal landscapes of the majority of the world's population.
Personal data has emerged as a highly valuable yet sensitive asset that drives business decisions, enables targeted advertising, and generates substantial revenue for companies, while simultaneously facilitating invasive monitoring of users. In recent years, research on digital privacy violations, including undue access, collection, and sharing of user data, has grown significantly. Much of this research adopts the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as the primary reference framework. This is reasonable, as GDPR was a pioneering legislation, and many of its stipulations are clear and unambiguous. However, we argue that focusing solely on GDPR (and a small set of other Western regulatory frameworks) ignores privacy-related concerns, attitudes, and problems faced by users from other locales, creating a significant research blind spot. This work systematically normalizes the heterogeneous legal requirements of multiple data protection laws into a unified abstraction aligned with the data lifecycle, which forms the foundation for the implementation of such regulations. We further investigate the implications of these laws on different stakeholders, including users, organizations, and governments. Overall, this work aims to broaden the digital privacy research community's perspective and to serve as a set of guiding principles for developing technological privacy solutions spanning multiple countries.
