Thank you to all of those who helped make the Privacy Panel held Wed. Jan. 29 such a success! We started a great conversation regarding what privacy looks like today and what we can expect from the agencies that play big roles when it comes to collecting and sharing our personal information. With the help of our panelists, we examined these issues from legal, marketing, and network security perspectives. Together, these different perspectives gave shape to a more complete picture of personal data management in a digital world, one where laws, policies, and education were lagging behind the exponential growth of technology. There were lots of great questions from the audience during the session, many of which we were left to ponder after the session ended. We would like to keep that conversation going and are providing this online forum as a space for students and faculty to continue the discussion of privacy in the digital age.
The following video, “Hot on Your Trail: Privacy, Your Data, and Who Has Access to It” from NPR, touches on many of the issues that we talked about in the panel. Check it out at the link below to see this well-illustrated and eye-opening portrayal of what is happening to our data during our normal day-to-day:
Here are some questions to get you thinking:
- Based on the Panel or the video, what concerns do you have personally regarding privacy and your personal data?
- During the Panel, we examined how the sharing of our data could be both helpful and harmful to us. It can be collected to make our lives easier or to protect us from potential threats, but does that make it okay? What level of privacy should we expect and what is reasonable?
- Both the video and the Panel touched on the fact that our data is being transferred all of the time, often without our realizing it. So much of this stuff is obscure to us, either because of long Terms of Use Agreements or because of a lack of transparency in business and government. How do we educate ourselves (or our children), especially when technology is changing so rapidly?
- We got to examine the issue of Privacy from many different angles during our panel. Looking through the lens of your major, what does privacy mean to you? How will these issues affect you in your future career?
To contribute to the conversation, DO THE FOLLOWING:
- POST a comment to this blog post. Respond to one of the questions above, or express any lingering thoughts that were left with you after attending the Panel.
- Check out some of the other posts. Do you have any reactions to those comments? If so, REPLY to keep the conversation going.
Thank you in advance for your participation. We look forward to reading your comments!