Metaphors of Privacy and Security
posted by:Hilary Young // 11:54 AM // January 24, 2005 // Core Concepts: language and labels
I stumbled upon a paper by Colin Potts of the Georgia Institute of Technology on metaphors of intent which (briefly) discusses metaphors related to privacy and security. Given my background in linguistics, this piqued my interest and I thought some of you might enjoy thinking about how these metaphors can lead to assumptions about the nature of security and/or privacy. For example, Potts points out that the term 'identity theft' "suggests not just that one's identifier may be misused but that in a real sense it may be stolen and therefore no longer be yours".
Potts observations are just teasers (he says almost nothing more about the metaphor of theft in identity theft), but are interesting nonetheless.
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fac/Colin.Potts/pubs/2001/re01/metaphor.pdf
(See section 3.3 [page 6])
