Our increasingly digital world has heightened concerns about privacy. Newspaper and media reporting influences and shapes public opinion, which impacts the strategic and operational decisions of a variety of stakeholders, making it crucial to understand how privacy-related issues are portrayed in the media. Leveraging time-series analysis, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis, this paper presents a comprehensive study on the coverage of privacy-related issues in newspapers from 2010 to 2022 across six regions of the world. Temporal trends in privacy coverage reveal a gradual increase in attention to privacy issues globally, with a notable surge observed in newspapers from the Global South, complementing the historically prominent Global North coverage. Topic modeling uncovers dominant themes in privacy reporting, revealing shifts in media focus from government surveillance to data breaches and tech corporations' role. Notably, the majority of privacy reporting carries a negative sentiment, emphasizing the widespread unease that pervades discussions surrounding privacy matters.

Abstract Over the past decade, research has explored managing the availability of shared personal online data, with particular focus on longitudinal aspects of privacy. Yet, there is no taxonomy that takes user perspective and technical approaches into account. In this work, we systematize research on longitudinal privacy management of publicly shared personal online data from these two perspectives: user studies capturing users’ interactions related to the availability of their online data and technical proposals limiting the availability of data. Following a systematic approach, we derive conflicts between these two sides that have not yet been addressed appropriately, resulting in a list of challenging open problems to be tackled by future research. While limitations of data availability in proposed approaches and real systems are mostly time-based, users’ desired models are rather complex, taking into account content, audience, and the context in which data has been shared. Our systematic evaluation reveals interesting challenges broadly categorized by expiration conditions, data co-ownership, user awareness, and security and trust.

Digital forgetting deals with the unavailability of content uploaded to web and storage servers after the data has served its purpose. The content on the servers can be deleted manually, but this does not prevent data archival and access at different storage locations. This is problematic since then the data may be accessed for unintended or even malicious purposes long after the owners have decided to abandon the public availability of their data. Approaches which assign a lifetime value to data or use heuristics like interest in data to make it inaccessible after some time have been proposed, but digital forgetting is still in its infancy and there are a number of open problems with the proposed approaches.