I’m kinda proud of the stars we’ve been bringing to our salon series here at Indiana University since 2021. And there are none I’m more excited to welcome than Helen Nissenbaum, who will be here on Tuesday to speak both in person and on Zoom. The title of her talk is “Why Obfuscation is (still) Needed (more than ever).”

Helen is the North Star of personal privacy—a role she earned by changing how the whole field understands what privacy is: specifically, that it’s not about secrecy or control, but about appropriate information flows. This was detailed in her landmark book, Privacy in Context, : Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, and backed by her work on practical tools such as the Adnauseum browser extension.

Her day job is as Professor of Information Science and the founding director of the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech. Visit that page to get a small sense of her range of involvements and influences.

Helen has been an influence on my own privacy work, most notably with MyTerms. If privacy matters even a fraction as much to you as it does to me, come or tune in to her talk, and be prepared with questions.

That’s next Tuesday at 4 pm Eastern. You can register and join the crowd here.

Or click on this to put it on your calendar:

It's not too late

Come join us for this at 4 pm Eastern today.

Also on the privacy front

One thinks of Thomson Reuters as a source of good information on issues (Thomson) and news (Reuters). That's the brand. Alas, it's also a source of information about you and me to ICE, Palantir, and others. That's what The Minnesota Star-Tribune reported back on March 3rd, and 404 Media does again today.

And so do all the others, no?

Will Lockett: 

Sam Altman just went on record saying intelligence **_will soon be sold on a meter, “like electricity or water.”
_**If you don’t understand what he just said, let me tell you.
He is not building a chat interface. He is building the grid for human cognition. And he intends to charge you for your own relevance.
They stole all this data from us, the people. Our life’s work, our creativity, our art. They devoured the open internet and blew through every copyright law on Earth.
And now they want to “sell it back to us” in the form of a utility?!

Only in America

Cory Doctorow explains how ICE in airports "hanging around like a bad smell and being totally useless" is a warm-up for their armed and masked presence at every polling place in November. He has concrete suggestions for stopping that, which he addresses to Democrats. Wise Republicans should be on board, too.