Privacy as Respect for Persons: Reimagining Privacy Literacy with the Six Private I’s Privacy Conceptual Framework

This chapter proposes the Six Private I’s Privacy Conceptual Framework as a tool for enriching PL practices with theory that is grounded in privacy norms. The purpose of Six Private I’s is to facilitate consideration of privacy with a primary focus on the benefits of privacy in the human experience. The title “Six Private I’s” refers to privacy’s role in personal identity, intellectual activities, contextual and bodily integrity, intimacy, social interaction, and voluntary withdrawal into seclusion (or isolation). The model depicts these concentric zones of information agency distinguished by boundaries of access and disclosure that each person negotiates in order to sustain a sense of self and to participate in a broad range of relationships.11 Six Private I’s is both informed by seemingly universal principles of privacy in the human experience and yet open enough to accommodate a range of phenomenologies, value systems, and choices related to privacy and disclosure. Six Private I’s visualizes the benefits of privacy, contributing to a conceptual vocabulary that PL practitioners can use to inform learning design, programming, and advocacy efforts in the service of renewing privacy norms.

Hartman-Caverly, S. & Chisholm, A. (2023). Privacy as Respect for Persons: Reimagining Privacy Literacy with the Six Private I’s Privacy Conceptual Framework. In S. Hartman-Caverly and A. Chisholm (Eds.), Practicing Privacy Literacy in Academic Libraries: Theories, Methods, and Cases. ACRL. doi.org/10.26207/5vvn-cw51

Contributor: Sarah Hartman-Caverly, Penn State University Libraries.