Thammasat University students are cordially invited to participate in a free Zoom book talk about Why Privacy Matters.

The seminar is organized by the Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of privacy.

The speaker will be Professor Neil Richards of the Washington University School of Law.

The TU Library owns some writings by Professor Richards and others are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

Students may register to receive a Zoom link at this link.

The event will be on Tuesday, 26 April at 7:30pm Bangkok time.

For further information or with any questions, please write to

fkleung@hku.hk

As the webpage announcing the event explains,

A much-needed corrective on what privacy is, why it matters, and how we can protect in an age when so many believe that the concept is dead.

Everywhere we look, companies and governments are spying on us – seeking information about us and everyone we know. Ad networks monitor our web-surfing to send us “more relevant” ads. The NSA screens our communications for signs of radicalism. Schools track students’ emails to stop school shootings. Cameras guard every street corner and traffic light, and drones fly in our skies. Databases of human information are assembled for purposes of “training” artificial intelligence programs designed to predict everything from traffic patterns to the location of undocumented migrants. We are even tracking ourselves, using personal electronics like Apple watches, Fitbits, and other gadgets that have made the “quantified self” a realistic possibility. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg once put it, “the Age of Privacy is over”, but Zuckerberg and others who say “privacy is dead” are wrong. In Why Privacy Matters, Professor Neil Richards explains that privacy is not dead, but rather up for grabs…

Professor Neil Richards is one of the world’s leading experts in privacy law, information law, and freedom of expression. He holds the Koch Distinguished Professorship at Washington University School of Law, where he co-directs the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine & Law.

Among other research by Professor Richards on related subjects is The Perils of Social Reading, published in the Georgetown Law Journal in 2013.

The article abstract reads:

Our law currently treats records of our reading habits under two contradictory rules: rules mandating confidentiality and rules permitting disclosure. Recently, the rise of the social Internet has created more of these records and more pressures on when and how they should be shared. Companies like Facebook, in collaboration with many newspapers, have ushered in the era of “social reading,” in which what we read may be “frictionlessly shared” with our friends and acquaintances. Disclosure and sharing are on the rise.

This Article sounds a cautionary note about social reading and frictionless sharing. Social reading might have some appeal, but the ways in which we set up the defaults for sharing matter a great deal. Our reader records implicate our intellectual privacy — the protection of reading from surveillance and interference so that we can read freely, widely, and without inhibition. I argue that the choices we make about how to share have real consequences and that frictionless sharing is neither frictionless nor is it really “sharing,” at least as we typically understand the term. The sharing of our reading habits is special. Such sharing should be conscious and only occur after meaningful notice.

The stakes in this debate are immense. We are quite literally rewiring the public and private spheres for a new century. Choices we make now — about the boundaries between our individual and social selves, between consumers and companies, and between citizens and the state — will have unforeseeable ramifications for the societies our children and grandchildren inherit. Even the setting of defaults we can opt out of will shape behavior and establish baselines of “normal” for our societies. We should make choices that preserve our intellectual privacy, not destroy it. This Article suggests practical ways to do just that.

Professor Richards observed,

Services like Spotify and the Washington Post Social Reader already integrate our reading and listening into social networks like Facebook, providing what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless experiences” of sharing. Under a regime of “frictionless sharing,” we don’t need to choose to share our activities online. Instead, everything we read or watch automatically gets uploaded to our Facebook or Twitter feed. As Zuckerberg puts it, “Do you want to go to the movies by yourself or do you want to go to the movies with your friends? You want to go with your friends.” Music, reading, web surfing, and Google searches, in this view, would all seem to benefit from being made social. Not so fast. This Article sounds a cautionary note against frictionless sharing and social reading. The sharing of book, film, and music recommendations is important, and social networking has certainly made it easier. But a world of automatic, always-on disclosure should give us pause. What we read, watch, and listen to matter because they are how we make up our minds about important social issues; in a very real sense, they are how we make sense of the world. What’s at stake is something I and other privacy scholars call “intellectual privacy”—the idea that records of our reading and movie watching deserve special protection compared to other kinds of personal information. The films we watch, the books we read, and the websites we visit are essential to the ways we try to understand the world in which we live. Intellectual privacy protects our ability to think for ourselves, without worrying that other people might judge us based on what we read. It allows us to explore ideas that other people might not approve of and to figure out our politics, sexuality, and personal values, among other things. It lets us watch or read whatever we want without fear of embarrassment or being outed…I’m not arguing that we should never disclose our intellectual preferences. On the contrary, sharing and commenting on books, films, and ideas are the essence of free speech. We need access to the ideas of others so that we can make up our minds for ourselves. Individual liberty has a social component. But when we share—or when we speak—we should do so consciously and deliberately, not automatically and unconsciously. Because of the constitutional magnitude of these values,8 our social, technological, and legal norms should support rather than undermine our intellectual privacy. At a practical level, the always-on “social sharing” of our reader records provides less valuable recommendations than conscious sharing, and it can deter us from exploring ideas that our friends might find distasteful. More importantly, social sharing and what it represents are particularly dangerous at this moment in history. We are undergoing a revolution in how we read as we increasingly move from paper to pixels. The default rules we set today will be sticky. Even if we have a choice to “opt out” of them, they will affect behavior. More fundamentally, the defaults we choose will come to represent a baseline of “normal” for reading and for privacy. Rather than “over-sharing,” we should share better—which means consciously—and we should expand the limited legal protections for intellectual privacy rather than dismantling them.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)