Abstract:
The scholarly literature presents a dizzying array of diverging definitions of privacy. Privacy is equally ambiguous in practice, where it is invoked to protect a wide range of interests based on an equally wide range of justifications. While the frequency and intensity of privacy debates are evidence of its salience to contemporary life, its contestability has intensely troubling practical consequences. Privacy is decreed too fickle and indeterminate to be advanced through legislative, regulatory, and technical means. Ambiguity becomes an excuse for disregarding privacy claims-despite visceral and broad appeal, and vociferous support. In this talk, I argue that privacy is an "essentially-contested concept," and that its contestability is a source of value and power that ought to be preserved. I then offer a multi-dimensional analytic of privacy that helps unpack privacy's meaning in specific contexts and contests. Using the analytic to explore privacy claims in high-profile privacy cases reveals the complex array of privacy concepts raised by technical change, and the sort of design and policy choices that can address them. Privacy's essential contestability is key to its ongoing relevance and utility in political and social life, but successfully leveraging it requires tools that ease privacy work by unpacking it's meaning in contexts.
Bio:
Deirdre K. Mulligan is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley, co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Policy lead for the NSF-funded TRUST Science and Technology Center. Prior to joining the School of Information in 2008, she was a Clinical Professor of Law, founding Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, and Director of Clinical Programs at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Mulligan’s current research agenda focuses on information privacy and security, including exploring users' conceptions of privacy in the online environment and their relation to existing theories of privacy. Her book with Berkeley Prof. Kenneth Bamberger, Privacy on the Ground: Driving Corporate Behavior in the United States and Europe, from MIT Press can be found at:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/privacy-ground
About NSF
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…" With an annual budget of $7.3 billion (FY 2015), we are the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. In many fields such as mathematics, computer science and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing.
We fulfill our mission chiefly by issuing limited-term grants -- currently about 11,000 new awards per year, with an average duration of three years -- to fund specific research proposals that have been judged the most promising by a rigorous and objective merit-review system. Most of these awards go to individuals or small groups of investigators. Others provide funding for research centers, instruments and facilities that allow scientists, engineers and students to work at the outermost frontiers of knowledge.