They are watching you. So what do you do about it?
National experts will provide Tucsonans with tips about how to protect themselves and their children from invasion of privacy in the digital age at the University of Arizona College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Downtown Lecture Series starting Wednesday and continuing through Nov. 16.
Topics will include how to keep kids safe online, protecting personal data when shopping, government surveillance, health data collected through wearables and media exposure and politics.
“The public needs to understand what’s out there and what’s at stake,” said one of the planned panelists, Jack Gillum, an Associated Press reporter who broke the story about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server at home.
Gillum, a Tucson native who covers privacy, technology and surveillance, said the key to keeping ourselves safe from people with the ability to look at our private material is staying aware of what is going on.
“It’s just being smart,” Gillum said. “It is about understanding that when you dial a phone number, type something on your phone or send an email, it’s going to be recorded.”
When it comes to children using online tools, lecture series organizer Lydia Breunig said kids cannot live a modern life without social media, but parents need to be armed with knowledge to protect them.
“People who didn’t grow up with social media tend to use it differently from the way teens and young adults are using it. Those differences are important to understanding privacy — and how it is changing in the digital age,” Breunig said.
The series aims for a more conversational approach this year rather than the lecture style of previous events, Breunig said. In addition to UA experts, panelists include representatives of Fitbit, the Federal Trade Commission, West Point Military Academy, the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Family Online Safety Institute.
The series hopes to connect with kids, parents and grandparents alike. “It’s for anyone who lives online,” said Breunig.
The series will end on government surveillance and the increasingly blurred lines between national security and a private citizen’s rights.
In March, the College of Social & Behavior Sciences hosted its first Conversation on Privacy and featured Edward Snowden via Skype and Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky live from Centennial Hall on the UA campus. The conversation will continue Nov. 16 with national security experts, such as Aaron Brantly from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
Brantly said that regardless of who is collecting a private citizen’s data, whether it is Google or a government agency, they either do it to sell products or to protect people.
He said the government has taken precautions to ensure transparency, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court system, the Executive Office and an inspector general at each of the agencies.
“There are dozens of overlapping layers of accountability,” Brantly said. “Just because the average citizen does not know exactly what is going on in any particular agency does not mean that there is an absence of oversight or accountability.”
This the College of Social and Behavior Sciences’ fourth annual lecture series. Previous series focused on happiness, food and immortality.
