What the Privacy Debate Gets Wrong
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2017
⏱️ 76 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
On January 13th, Benjamin Wittes and Emma Kohse released a new paper challenging the assumption that "privacy is an eroding value," worn away by the incessant collection of online data about consumer habits. Their paper, "The Privacy Paradox II: Measuring the Privacy Benefits of Privacy Threats," uses empirical data from Google consumer surveys to study how many people actually experience the technologies often accused of eroding privacy as increasing their privacy instead.Â
In an event at the Brookings Institution, Ben sat down with Stewart Baker of Steptoe & Johnson and Amie Stepanovich of Access now to discuss the paper. This week, we're bringing you that conversation on the podcast.Â
One note: Ben's opening remarks reference Powerpoint slides containing the survey results, which you can view in the paper itself—available here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | Who's perception of the reality of privacy is the one for which we should have solicitude as a society? |
| 0:43.0 | Is it some set of objective criteria defined by the community of people who professionally and intellectually care about privacy? |
| 0:54.0 | Or is it privacy as a lived experience of the aggregation of hundreds of millions of people? |
| 1:02.0 | Now, I think the right answer to that question is both, but I think in our conversation we underestimate the value of the lived experience side of that question. |
| 1:14.0 | And of the person who says, I feel uncomfortable with reading 50 Shades of Grey on the subway. |
| 1:22.0 | That strikes me as a legitimate human experience that for that person is a real privacy value. |
| 1:30.0 | I'm Quinta Jurassic and this is the LawFair podcast, January 21, 2017. |
| 1:38.0 | Last week, Benjamin Wittis and Emma Coasey released a new paper challenging the idea that consumers are routinely trading way their privacy |
| 1:46.0 | as big corporations in the government collect data on online behavior. |
| 1:50.0 | Using Google survey data, Ben and Emma suggest that many people experience new technologies as increasing rather than decreasing privacy. |
| 2:00.0 | In an event at the Brookings Institution, Ben sat down with Stuart Baker and Amy Stepanovich to talk about the paper titled The Privacy Paradox 2, |
| 2:09.0 | Measuring the Privacy Benefits of Privacy Threats. |
| 2:13.0 | One quick note before we begin, Ben's opening remarks reference PowerPoint slides containing the survey results. |
| 2:20.0 | You can see the results in the paper itself, which will link in the post along with the podcast. |
| 2:25.0 | It's the LawFair podcast, Episode 205. What the Privacy Debate gets wrong? |
| 2:32.0 | This is a project that I've been working on for a while, which is to try to improve the way and think through the way we keep score in the privacy conversation. |
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