EDITORIAL Redesigning or Redefning Privacy? Shabnam Moinipour 1 and Pinelopi Troullinou 2 1 University of Westminster, GB 2 The Open University, GB Corresponding author: Shabnam Moinipour (Shabnam.moinipour@gmail.com) Snowden’s revelations of 2013 have shifted attention to societal implications of surveillance practices and in particular privacy. This editorial refects on key concepts and research questions raised in the issue. How can privacy be defned? Can it be designed? Considering such developments, this editorial asks if the public’s attitudes to the sharing of data have moved towards, ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ arguments and if greater awareness and corporate transparency are possible. Even if corporate surveillance does not operate through overt coercion, it is argued that it yet results in self-regulation and subjugation to neoliberal rationality. Since telecoms and social media companies generally work hand in hand with the state and legal and practical standpoints boundaries overlap on a great scale, how can privacy be safeguarded for citizens? And where ‘accountability’ of data holders, as interviewee Mark Andrejevic suggests, is a growing imperative. Contributions to this issue suggest detailed attention to legal frameworks, encryption practices, defnitions of the surveilled subject and the history of such scrutiny may hold some of the answers. Keywords: Privacy; surveillance; corporations; democracy; design; the state The easy and immediate access to the internet through personal digital gadgets has contributed to a vast shift of traditionally offline activities to an online environment. These actions extend from personal communication, to information, entertainment, purchases and other transactions. The convenience and speed of the so-called digital era, however, seems to come with a high price – that of privacy. In a broader context, data produced through online activities make the search of data, sorting and mining more readily available (Andrejevic, 2012) whilst characterising our society as a surveillance one (Gandy, 1989; Lyon, 1994). In a ‘liquid surveillance’ (Bauman and Lyon, 2012) where the borders of security and marketing have merged, these data are gathered by different means, but are of benefit to both the state and to companies since surveillance techniques such as profiling, social sorting and predicting are used for marketing and security purposes. These surveillant practices over the general population have raised a public debate especially following Snowden’s revelations in the summer of 2013 with concerns emerging over privacy invasion (Rust et al., 2002: 455). Yet, discourses of ‘dangerization’ have led to the public reproducing the well-known argument of ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ supporting Moinipour, S. and Troullinou, P. (2017). Redesigning or Redefning Privacy? Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 12(3), 1–4, DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/wpcc.271