When Privacy is a Facade for Data Extraction

Host Kirsten Martin is joined by Ari Waldman, professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University, where he is the director of the Center for Law, Information, and Creativity. A leading authority on law, technology, and society, he studies how law and technology affect marginalized populations, with particular focus on privacy, misinformation, and the LGBTQ community.   Ari came on the show to talk about his book Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power, published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.   Intended for both a general audience of technology practitioners and more research-focused tech scholars, the book begins with interviews meant to construct a “day in the life” of people working at tech companies—which in one instance included something called “the bro meeting”—and their thoughts on privacy. Ari says his two biggest takeaways from a sociological perspective were the limits to these employees’ conceptions of what constitutes “privacy” and a false consciousness of what their companies were actually doing (or not doing) on that front.   He and Kirsten talk about how compliance is routinely used as a way to advance the goals of industry rather than the rights of users, with the corporate idea of privacy even shaping the regulatory approach of laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), such that companies don’t have to change their underlying models of data extraction.   Kirsten and Ari also cover parallels between privacy and diversity compliance, the problems with notice and consent, how privacy shouldn’t be confused with encryption and security, the way siloed teams hinder information flow and negatively impact the product design process, and what it would take to shift the culture around privacy.