The Privacy Advisor Podcast: Product design as power and manipulation

08/24/18 • 38 min

Woodrow Hartzog is law professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and his research focuses on quote “the complex problems that arise when personal information is collected by powerful new technologies, stored and disclosed online.” In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Hartzog discusses discusses the ways that technologies are designed, at the engineering level, to undermine our privacy. Social media companies, for example, which make money on user data via advertisers, "have every incentive to use the power they have with designers to engineer your almost near-constant disclosure of information," Hartzog says, adding our modern privacy frameworks, which emphasize informed consent, are broken models. "We will be worn down by design, our consent is pre-ordained," he says.

Previous Episode

The Privacy Advisor Podcast: On why CaCPA is bad law and suing Kanye West

What we know about attorney Jay Edelson to date: He loves beach volleyball so much that he had a court installed at his Chicago law firm so he and his crew could blow off steam. The New York Times refers to him as Silicon Valley's "baby faced boogeyman" for his aggressive court takedowns of tech behemoths. And he's got a very firm grasp on the global privacy and data protection legislative landscape. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Edelson talks about his latest legal pursuits, including a class-action lawsuit against Facebook for alleged violation of biometric privacy law, and another against Kanye West over alleged consumer privacy violations via his music streaming service, Tidal. Edelson also discusses why he thinks the new California Consumer Protection Act is no good.

Next Episode

The Privacy Advisor Podcast: How 57 women won seats at the Defcon table

Ask anyone who frequents Defcon, known as a sort of summer camp for hackers, and they'll tell you the attendee roster at the wildly popular white hat event is overwhelmingly male. Rachel Tobac, chair of the board at Women in Security and Privacy, has been going to Defcon to compete in Social Engineering Capture the Flag for the last three years, and winning. She's gained some notoriety for it, including appearing on this podcast twice before. But noticing she was very much in the minority, she decided she didn't just want to go to Defcon this year, she wanted to bring women in privacy and security with her. An effort that initially saw two women winning sponsorships to attend ended in 57 actually boarding a flight to Vegas. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Tobac tells us how it happened and why it matters.