Reengineering privacy, post-Snowden

Technology and policy experts convene at Harvard symposium on “Privacy in a Networked World”

January 28, 2015

By Caroline Perry

Privacy isn’t what it used to be. Post-Sony, post-Snowden, we know our digital world is insecure, yet most of us continue to share a vast amount of personal information over networks. Balancing anxiety with convenience, autonomy with value, we negotiate a new definition of privacy every time we download a new app.

“It’s not the right to be left alone anymore,” said Lee Rainie ’73, the Pew Research Center’s Director of Internet, Science, and Technology Research, speaking at Harvard on January 23. “It’s the right to be in control of what people understand about you, … what kind of sharing is done, who has access to your data, and if you can correct mistakes that others make about you.”

But, he said, it’s not really working. Fifty percent of U.S. adults responding to a recent Pew survey said they have “not much control” or “no control” over how their personal information is collected and shared.

For all our technological advancement, legacy systems persist in our email and Internet service providers, online social networks, search engines, e-commerce, electronic medical records, and other networked databases. And most of them are at risk—if not prone to security breaches or secret back doors, then certainly failing to live up to the expectations of a privacy-conscious public.


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Continua qui: http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2015/01/reengineering-privacy-post-snowden