Is Privacy Becoming a Luxury Good?

Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist for the independent news organization ProPublica. From 2000 to 2013, she was a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she was on a team of reporters that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of corporate corruption. At the Journal, she also led a team covering online privacy that was a finalist for a 2012 Pulitzer.

In Dragnet Nation, Angwin presents an unsettling look at how the government, private companies, and even criminals use technology to indiscriminately sweep up vast amounts of our personal data. She argues that the greatest long-term danger is that we start to internalize the surveillance and censor our words and thoughts, losing our freedom and individuality in the process. Appalled at this prospect, Angwin conducts a series of experiments to try to protect herself, ranging from quitting Google to carrying a ‘burner’ phone, showing how difficult it is for the average citizen to escape the reach of the dragnets.

About this Lecture

We are being watched—by companies, by the government, by our neighbors. Technology has made powerful surveillance tools available to everyone. And now some of us are investing in counter-surveillance techniques and tactics. Julia Angwin discusses how much she has spent trying to protect her privacy, and raises the question of whether we want to live in a society where only the rich can buy their way out of ubiquitous surveillance.

Featured Books

Helpful Links

Angwin‘s Website
Includes links to privacy tools and information on her book, Dragnet Nation; Excerpt from the book

No Escaping Dragnet Nation
An interview with Bill Moyers about the book
14 March 2014

Stanford Law School Lecture
Angwin speaks at the Stanford Law School about her book
06 May 2014