Policy Director Micheal Vonn joins the Langara College Philosophers’ Jam Dialogue Series
“Does Privacy Still Matter?”
The Wellcome Trust in the UK is promoting a plan to have all citizens’ DNA sequenced and stored with their electronic health records, while Wikileaks discloses secret cables in which Hilary Clinton directed embassy staff to secretly collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials (hey, didn’t I see that on an episode of the X-files… ) and practically everyone is voluntarily offering up their lives to Facebook, making fortunes for data brokers who call “personal information the new ‘oil’ of the Internet”.
Where does the value of privacy fit into all this? Does anyone value privacy anymore? And what are we really getting in exchange for new intrusions into our privacy? Do we really need to see through people’s clothing with body scanners to be safe on an airplane?
What happens to our democracy when people are more and more transparent (for safety) and government is more and more secret (for security)? The only thing that both sides of the privacy debate agree on is that we need a new vision of privacy for the modern era.
