2. Search terms

Finding the right information comes down to knowing the right keywords and phrases.

Finding information is easy — but just using the most obvious keywords and an Internet search engine brings up too much.

A quick search there for ‘privacy’ using Google brings up 8,30,00,00,000 (i.e., more than 8 billion or 8 Arabs) results, and ‘privacy policies’ brings up 1,12,00,00,000 (i.e., more than 1 billion) and an information dump like that makes me feel overwhelmed. I clearly need to be more careful in what I’m looking for, and where.

Basic terms in Google Scholar and got over 43,50,000 results… still way too much to read, so then I narrowed the search a bit to a specific time frame….

Writing more specific terms, I got over 88,800 results… better than the previous search.

Some interesting things came up, definitely worth reading… the first item has been cited by a lot of others, so I’ll read that, it’ll give me a good starting point… it’s 5 years old, and if I could also get a review paper that would be really nice.

Before I move forward, I want to think carefully about the terms I’m using… need to brainstorm some more specific things within this general topic, like maybe:

• privacy in the Asian context
• social media and privacy
• privacy harms
• emerging technologies to control or check the privacy
• mobile phones privacy vs desktop privacy
• privacy policies and regulations
• data protection and privacy
• people and smartphone relationship and behaviour
• types of privacy
• issues regarding privacy
• informed consent
• unintentional information sharing with third parties
• electronic consent
• data collection and permission
• data sharing
• privacy and security
• informational privacy

Quick searches with these terms give me a good sense of how much is out there, and browsing a few papers gives me more keywords to add to my list.

Searching on JSTOR, helped me better to see good papers related to my research and what I want to do.

I also just found something about software that searches for open source publications that access millions of documents across the disciplines… and a beta version ‘mapper’ of key concepts in a field that draws on BASE, called ‘Open Knowledge Maps’ — you type in a search term or phrase and it gives you back a visual overview of the topic, (like a concept map of the field), and a list of harvested links to publications it’s found… great way to pick up more search terms!

I will keep digging until, I find the good papers, articles and journals to read.