A moderate interpretation of group privacy illustrated by cases from disaster management

This article uses cases from disaster management as a springboard for presenting a critique of a right to group privacy in a strong sense. As such, the article challenges the idea of strong group privacy, which holds that there are situations in which the group, and not its members, is the holder of a right to privacy. The paper argues for a moderate interpretation of group privacy, stressing that group privacy is a matter of privacy for the members constituting the group. Although data-driven knowledge discovery implies profiling by group categorization, this observation does not constitute a reason to introduce a right to group privacy for other purposes than to protect the individual's right to privacy. The article demonstrates preliminary theoretical considerations, which may inform the creation of a framework that protects personal privacy by considering a moderate sense of group privacy suited to tackle privacy challenges implied by data analytics.