DARE UK PRiAM Project D4 Report: Public Engagement: Understanding private individuals' perspectives on privacy and privacy risk

This report summarises the results from engagement with one of the DARE UK PRiAM project’s key stakeholders: the general public. The aim of DARE UK PRiAM has been work towards a standard privacy risk assessment framework for those seeking to operate a secure, trusted infrastructure environment within cross-council collaborative research networks. To complement this work, understanding private individuals’ perspectives on privacy and privacy risk provides a significant contribution to how to articulate to those who might engage with those services or infrastructure environments.
Since the implementation of the (UK) GDPR, data subject rights have been brought to the fore, along with the obligations of those who might process their data. Guidance is available to ensure GDPR compliance. However, less is understood about how private individuals respond to their rights or to how a data controller or data processor uses their data.
A series of workshops were organised to capture the privacy attitudes of a group of 10 self-selecting individuals particularly interested in privacy assessment and risk. Their views were used in the first instance to understand the general public’s views on privacy. Further, the results from the workshops were used to develop a privacy attitudes questionnaire for a larger, random cohort representative of the general public.