Mary C. Lacity’s research while affiliated with University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and other places

In this chapter, the editors of Human Privacy in Virtual and Physical Worlds introduce readers to the aims of this book, which are to understand human privacy from multiple disciplines and to inspire privacy researchers to broaden their research perspectives beyond the limitations of a single disciplinary lens. This introductory chapter sets up the tripartite structure for the entire book: foundations of human privacy, technical views on privacy, and domain-specific views of privacy. In all, contributors hail from ten different fields, including anthropology, architecture, data science, engineering, history, information systems, library sciences, medicine, philosophy, and supply chain management. This introductory chapter summarizes each individual chapter and identifies four themes from across the chapters: First, privacy is best understood as a multifaceted, contextual, and temporal concept, which means that any attempts to identify universal truths would diminish the depth of understanding. Second, individuals’ rights to privacy are often in conflict with the group’s desire or right to know; finding the balance involves power and structural constructs. Third, privacy law permeates many discussions because professionals in every field must adhere to restrictions relevant to their jurisdiction; most authors advocate privacy-enhancing policies and practices beyond mere legal compliance. Finally, while the chapters written by the philosopher and the anthropologist caution against assuming that individual privacy is universally valued and should invariably be safeguarded, the authors of the technology and domain-specific chapters predominantly advocate for the valuation and protection of individual privacy and offer concrete practices to protect privacy.

This chapter has two purposes. First, we describe how information system (IS) scholars approach privacy research and summarize major findings. IS scholars are concerned with information privacy and have discovered that individuals have serious information privacy concerns. These concerns, however, do not prevent individuals from disclosing personal identifiable information (PII) with centralized platform providers, a phenomenon called the privacy paradox . We highlight four common explanations for the privacy paradox: privacy calculus, privacy fatigue, trust, and lack of choice. Most IS research investigated Web2 applications. Web2 is the foundation for today’s global economy. With Web2, users rely on centralized platforms for online searching, shopping, banking, data storage, social media, and other services. Second, we introduce readers to the new paradigm of Web3. Privacy protection has been the paramount logic behind the grand design of Web3 applications. Web3 is the era of the Internet that is based on decentralized infrastructures and applications, like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Web3 applications enhance information privacy compared to Web2 because individuals can access services without disclosing PII to a central authority. The privacy objective is achieved technically through a combination of digital wallets, cryptography, and distributed ledgers (a.k.a blockchain). While Web3 is still in its early days, education is an important driver of adoption.

Marlon Blackwell is the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture and a Distinguished Professor in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He’s earned many awards, including the 2020 AIA Gold Medal, which is the highest honor awarded by the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In addition to being a full-time faculty member, he is also the founder and the principal at Marlon Blackwell Architects (MBA), based in Fayetteville Arkansas. His lecture on “architectural privacy” was the most popular in the University of Arkansas Honors course on privacy. We interviewed him in June of 2023 to capture his design philosophy in relation to privacy. The conversation focused on four architectural privacy themes: (1) the relationship between privacy and comfort, and the roles of (2) primary, secondary, and tertiary spaces, (2) light, and (3) sounds in creating private moments in public spaces. A fifth theme encapsulates the essence of his design philosophy: “ennobling the prosaic.”

Although many information systems (IS) scholars have researched the antecedents and consequences of trust in technology, the sheer amount of work published, authors’ use of inconsistent construct terms, and variations in conceptualization and measurement make it difficult to compare and aggregate findings across studies. To provide scholars with an overview of the literature, we performed a systematic qualitative review of the IS literature. The goal of our review was to identify the antecedents and consequences of trust in technology that have received frequent empirical support, as well as those for which the evidence is not yet conclusive. To that end, we curated a glossary of unique construct terms and summarized the results of 241 relationships tested in 62 empirical research articles (both quantitative and qualitative) from the AIS “Basket of Eight” journals. From these, we identified 62 unique relationships: 22 are well-supported, 6 are supported by suggestive evidence, and 34 have received little support. These relationships summarize what is well-known and less well-known within the literature. By taking stock, we prepare a path for future research on the phenomenon of trust in the context of emerging technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence and blockchain). We conclude the paper with opportunities and directions for future research.

In this paper, we review and analyze two literatures on the construct of human trust in IT artifacts and in the entities that source, operate, and govern IT. The first literature review focuses on defining of the construct of trust across a range of disciplines. Our analysis of this literature identified 13 assumptions about the nature of trust. The assumptions illustrate the complexities of human trust. The second literature review focused on 214 empirical studies of the construct of trust published in the AIS Senior Scholars’ Basket of Eight journals. We analyze this literature to identify IS scholar’s most common assessments of trust from qualitative studies and most common measures of trust from quantitative studies. As a cumulative body of knowledge, IS scholars have deeply examined different types of trust. IS scholars have also extensively examined the assumption that trust is dynamic, as evidenced by the many qualitative papers that examined trust as a process, and trust in Web2 technologies, which are characterized by centralized applications and centralized governance. While the IS scholarly community has established a substantial tradition around the construct of trust, there is still interesting work to be done. With recent releases of open generative AI and with the rise of Web3 technologies like blockchains that purport to be “trustless”, the construct of trust in IT needs to be re-examined in these emerging contexts. We also encourage more research on trust in bi-directional relationships, on the limits of transitive trust, and on the construct of distrust.

Information systems (IS) is a peculiar hybrid wanting often to define itself as a discipline, though it has assembled itself as something that could more persuasively be called a field. It is shot through with ‘discipline anxiety’—the kind of thing, for example, social sciences display toward natural sciences, economics toward mathematics, and management toward economics and quantitative methods. Part of this discipline anxiety has been to keep returning to a rigor versus relevance debate, as if both rigor AND relevance were not critical to the study of an applied, fast-changing study area, driven by emerging technologies, the exponential data explosion, and related phenomena.

This chapter envisions how verifiable credentials could work in the token economy. Many standards-making bodies, open source working groups, organizations, and individuals are working on self-sovereign identity (SSI) and decentralized verifiable credentials. Commonly suggested principles include identity binding, privacy and security, user control, availability to all, interoperability across platforms, user consent, data minimization, and transparency about data creation, collection, storage, and use. Solutions will likely make use of consensus-driven, international standards in distributed technologies like smart wallets, blockchains, utility tokens, and decentralized identifiers (DIDs). To achieve this vision, the roles of issuers, holders, and verifiers—known as the “trust triangle”—must be incentivized to adopt the solution. We provide examples of two early solutions for verifiable credentials: SmartResume and digital health passes (DHPs). iDatafy’s SmartResume is a job market platform that creates digital resumes based on verifiable credentials and secures these credentials on a blockchain. Digital health passes (DHPs) prove our health to verifiers so we can return to travel, work, school, and play. We assess the degree to which these solutions subscribe to the suggested principles of verifiable credentials and describe how participants are incentivized to join the ecosystem. We found that these first-generation solutions meet some, but not yet all, of the suggested principles for fully decentralized verifiable credentials. The early solutions are “minimal viable products” that will likely improve in the future based on feedback and experimentation. Trusted third parties are still needed for services, and interoperability standards, user-generated identifiers, utility tokens are not yet advanced enough for wide-scale adoptions of SSI and verifiable credentials, but we can more easily see the possibilities.KeywordsCredentialsTrust triangleTrust diamondBlockchainsJob marketsDigital health passesUtility tokens

Information Systems (IS) scholars have made significant contributions to blockchain knowledge since blockchain technologies were first implemented in 2009 with the launch of Bitcoin. The overarching espoused aim of blockchain technologies is the decentralization of power over the Internet. Peer-to-peer payments were the first applications, followed by platforms for decentralized applications, decentralized autonomous organizations, and, more recently, self-sovereign identity, decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens, and metaverses. JIT invited Mary Lacity, director of the Blockchain Center of Excellence at the University of Arkansas, to provide an overview of the major innovations, explain how early enterprise adopters are using these innovations, and where these technologies might be headed. This paper, formatted as a conversation, hopes to inspire more IS scholars to engage in this rapidly evolving area.

This teaching case explores the advantages and disadvantages of battling fake news with advanced information technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchains. Students will explore the purposes of, proliferation of, susceptibility to, and consequences of fake news and assess the efficacy of new interventions that rely on emerging technologies. Key questions students will explore: How can we properly balance freedom of speech and the prevention of fake news? What ethical guidelines should be applied to the use of AI and blockchains to ensure they do more good than harm? Will technology be enough to stop fake news?

Blockchain (BC) technology, defined as a shared information system to validate, secure, and permanently store transactions among multiple parties on a distributed ledger, presents many applications in agricultural and food industries. This study examines the application of BC in food traceability for beef in the United States using a choice experiment. Findings indicate that consumers value USDA certifications over BC trace-ability to guide their meat preferences. Our study suggests a number of industry implications, the most important of which suggests focusing business and consumer education on the value of product data, rather than on the value of the technologies that manage data.