Data Privacy, Ethics and Society

1. 1. What privacy is, and why it's contested

   You arrive certain you know what privacy is. You’ll leave less sure — which is the point. Two real, current cases pull the ground out from under the easy definition.

2. 2. Ethical frameworks as tools, not doctrines

   Four lenses for reasoning about privacy when your intuitions can’t tell you why something is wrong — plus a quick map of the data lifecycle we’ll use all term — and what to do when the lenses disagree.

3. 3. Consent, collection, and the limits of agreement

   The mechanism everyone pretends solves privacy — “I agree” — and why it can’t. Two contrasts: the app you didn’t read, and the car you didn’t know was listening.

4. 4. Privacy-enhancing technology and its human limits

   When consent fails, the next hope is that the technology protects you — anonymization, privacy tools, safeguards. This week we test that hope, and then ask the harder question underneath every failure so far.

5. 5. Data brokers and the invisible profile
   The secondary data economy that assembles a detailed portrait of a person from scattered sources, and the individual's inability to see or correct it.
6. 6. State surveillance and the security–liberty tradeoff
   Government surveillance as a power relationship, and the recurring tension between collective security and individual liberty.
7. 7. Corporate and workplace surveillance
   Monitoring by employers and companies as a mechanism of control, and what constant observation does to autonomy and behavior.
8. 8. The end of withholding: when the machine surfaces what no one could see Pillar
   The pillar. A model extracting a true, present fact latent in data a person did not know they were transmitting — collapsing the line between what you disclose and what you withhold, and ending privacy as something you can practice.
9. 9. Algorithmic bias and discrimination by design
   How automated decision systems encode and amplify discrimination, and who bears the harm when a system decides.