Carissa Véliz is associate professor in philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, a fellow at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and the author of Privacy Is Power (Bantam Press, 2020)
So, we know she’s going to say something stupid but what’s it going to be?
The United Kingdom is at a crossroads. On the verge of Brexit, it has to decide where it stands in relation to privacy: will it loosen data protection regulation, moving more towards China’s model, or will it guarantee its citizens’ right to privacy, moving more towards a Californian approach and securing a data adequacy agreement with the EU? It would be a mistake to choose the former.
The Irish data commissioner has just declared that the American system of data regulation is not compatible with the EU one…..
Brexit means there is no reason to get the agreement of the EU to Britain’s data protection laws.
“moving more towards China’s model, ”
Ummmm.. Customer (for a given value of “customer”) data collection, and the trade in it, in the US is rampant. The Californian hamfisted attempt at curbing it is an outlier with legal loopholes you can drive an armoured division through.
And that’s not even going into the mass surveillance perpetrated by certain US agencies under the umbrella of “National Security” or “War on Drugs”.
Which again pales in comparison to some of the things “IoT”/”smart” devices built by civilian companies send Back to Base…
So….why China? Other than the easy Bugbear to get attention.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, if you share data you’d rather keep secret, especially but not exclusively on the internet, you are not keeping it secret any more.
How I wish I had established several fake identities back when it was easy.
In my experience there are some clever and lively minds in Philosophy. It really doesn’t bear much resemblance to Eng Lit. Still, exceptions will exist.