ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the thoughts and evidence presented in this book on privacy and identity in a networked society. As argued, socio-technical identifiability is a crucial determinant of a privacy impact and lacking control thereof is a core problem of contemporary privacy protection. This problem is likely to worsen as identifiability expands significantly with the ongoing digital transformation of society and a privacy control dilemma of digital identification, reinforcing information asymmetries. Consequently, effective privacy protection becomes even more burdensome and challenging—for individuals as well as for institutions. To ease the problem I argue for a revitalization of the public value of privacy and propose a framework for privacy impact assessment including a typology of identifiable information. This framework contributes to improving the understanding of the emergence of privacy impacts, the implementation of privacy by design and, thus, to raising the general quality of privacy protection. To achieve this requires not least more accountability and responsible handling of identifiable information by all processing entities.
