The (Alleged) Death of Privacy
The final installment in the “What does digital scholarship do?” HASTAC Scholars series at the University of Washington is scheduled for tomorrow on the Seattle campus.
The conversation—”‘You Have One Identity’: Facebook, Twitter, and the (Alleged) Death of Privacy”—happens on Thursday, June 3rd, at 4:30 p.m., in Communications 202 (in the Simpson Center for the Humanities). It is open to the public.
Deen Freelon (PhD Candidate, Dept. of Communication) will be facilitating. Below is a description of the event, and here is the flier (in PNG). Looking forward!
Online privacy, one of the longest-running topics of interest in digital scholarship (with references dating back to the early 1980s), has recently taken center stage in the public consciousness. Far-reaching decisions by the upper managements of Facebook, Twitter, and other services that accumulate user information as a business practice have gone further than provoking the ire of the usual scholarly suspects: they have sparked a public controversy over the fundamental meaning of privacy in the 21st century. The aim of this colloquium is to bring together a diverse set of scholarly perspectives to discuss the implications of the recent changes, which include Facebook’s exposure of an unprecedented amount of personal information to the entire internet and Twitter’s agreement to allow the Library of Congress to permanently archive every public tweet—past, present, and future. While all relevant theories will be admissible, the colloquium will revolve around three conceptual foci: the alleged death of privacy, the politics of technological design choices, and the normative question of how the burden of safeguarding user privacy should be distributed between the user and the data-holding entity. It is recommended, though not required, that attendees read in advance the recent essay by danah boyd on the implications of Facebook’s assumptions about privacy.
Check out the first six installments of the series, too!: “Engaging the Networked Domestic,” “Pink Noises,” “Digital Fabrication and the Database,” “Evaluating Digital Scholarship,” “Queer/ing/s Online” and “Designing Discoverability.”
Thanks to the Simpson Center for sponsoring the conversation series this year. It’s been a fantastic opportunity to listen to folks share their ideas and learn from them.
