“We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now.” These lines are from E.M. Forster’s prescient story, “The Machine Stops” from 1909. Dystopian fiction has long warned us about the future, and we’re witnessing dire warnings from last century come true today. Forster’s story captures many of the current problems with AI and digital technologies.
I’ve long enjoyed collecting ads that attempt to market privacy. Here are some of the highlights of my collection. Please be sure to read to the end, as there are many great video ads, which find ways to tell stories and make arguments for privacy that resonate with the public.
I’ve long found fiction to be one of the most fruitful ways to explore technology. This essay series grows out of my love for the humanities—as a consumer and creator.
SPOILER ALERT: My discussion involves spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
In the early days, there was barely a playbook for privacy governance, and privacy professionals had to make it up as they went along. Today, there is a wealth of wisdom, and it’s being applied to the emerging area of AI.
I’ve been following privacy books for many years, and I’ve created a free resource that includes information about 500+ privacy books over the last 70+ years.
In this post, I’ll briefly discuss some key books on privacy and AI governance. Each has something unique to offer, and I think they all belong on the bookshelves of all privacy and AI governance professionals.Continue Reading
We’re increasingly bringing surveillance upon ourselves with the devices we use. These devices are gathering an enormous amount of our data, and this information is readily available for the government to access.
Professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson tackles the implications of these developments in his new book, Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.
Unlike 160+ countries, unlike almost every industrialized nation, the U.S. has been an outlier because it lacks a comprehensive privacy law. Congress has been trying repeatedly to pass one, without luck, an effort that has faltered because such a law involves many complicated issues that require thoughtfulness and compromise, which don’t exist in Congress these days.
Congress’s latest foray is a new bill called the SECURE Data Act, a piece of garbage cooked up by Republicans as a gift to industry in a climate where the public is deeply concerned about privacy, outraged at the harms tech is causing, and yearning for ways to hold Big Tech accountable.
I can’t stress enough how awful this bill is. On balance, if passed into law, it will do dramatic harm to privacy. It will leave people less protected than if it didn’t exist. I’d call it more of an anti-privacy law than a privacy law.
I’ll briefly provide a few reasons why this bill is terrible and should not be passed.
Watch Daniel Solove and Jonathon Penney discuss his book, Chilling Effects and how law, surveillance, and technology is being weaponized to chill and control us, and what to do about it.
Watch Daniel Solove and Jacob Ward discuss about the dangers of AI being used to manipulate and control people.
AI and digital technologies have been unleashed upon us, with an unprecedented zeal and recklessness, and a reckoning is long overdue.
The Meta and YouTube $6 million addiction verdict this week is an important milestone. I’m not an expert on the addiction issue, so I won’t opine on the merits of the case. Instead, I want to point out how the case affects the bigger picture of accountability for technology and AI.
