Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Law with June Brusso from Bloomberg Radio. Beautiful, beautiful, unethical, dangerous.
Speaker 1: You've turned every cell phone in Gotham into a microphone.
Speaker 1: This is wrong. I've got to find this man, Lucius.
Speaker 1: At what cost? This is an audious He talks with
Speaker 1: a range of any phone in the city. You can
Speaker 1: triangulate his position. I'll help you this one time. In
Speaker 1: the dark night Batman uses an unexplained technology to convert
Speaker 1: cell phones into a citywide tracking system to find the joker.
Speaker 1: That technology may have seemed like science fiction when the
Speaker 1: movie was released more than a decade ago, but now
Speaker 1: it's real and today. Geo fence warrants allowed law enforcement
Speaker 1: to search Google sensor vault database to get location records
Speaker 1: for all mobile phones within a virtual perimeter at specified times,
Speaker 1: raising privacy and Fourth Amendment issues. A robbery case in
Speaker 1: Virginia will be a high stakes legal test for the
Speaker 1: dramatic spike and police use of geo fence warrants to
Speaker 1: identify suspects. The first Fourth Amendment challenge to a geo
Speaker 1: fence warrant in a federal court. Here to explain the
Speaker 1: legal challenges, Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor at Northeastern University
Speaker 1: Law School. Are new figures from Google show a tenfold
Speaker 1: increase in the use of these geo fence warrants in
Speaker 1: the last three years. Explain what they are. Geo fence
Speaker 1: warrants are tools that government uses to take advantage of
Speaker 1: the data that private companies gather about us, like where
Speaker 1: we are, where we use our phone, where we use
Speaker 1: Apple pay, where we buy products, that can essentially just
Speaker 1: like track individuals wherever they are. Think about it as
Speaker 1: kind of a suped up version of getting self site data.
Speaker 1: You know, when you drive down the New Jersey Turnpike
Speaker 1: or you drive down a highway, your cell phone connects
Speaker 1: to different towers and you can identify where a car
Speaker 1: has been or where it's going. A warrant to get
Speaker 1: ge offense data is essentially here a company, where you
Speaker 1: have gathered all this information about what we normally do
Speaker 1: every minute of the day. Give us that information so
Speaker 1: we can track where a potential suspect is. But a
Speaker 1: judge has authorized the warrant based on a finding of
Speaker 1: probable cause. Yeah, police get a warrant when an independent
Speaker 1: judge feels that there is probable cause to that some
Speaker 1: criminal activity is happening. It's often relatively easy to get
Speaker 1: a warrant, But the idea is that at least the
Speaker 1: police have to justify to an independent arbiter like a judge,
Speaker 1: that this information is necessary. But the fact that someone
Speaker 1: got a warrant, that's okay. But you have to ask yourself,
Speaker 1: did individual in giving over this information to private parties
Speaker 1: right and using tools like Google or an iPhone or
Speaker 1: so forth, and using tools where we may expect or
Speaker 1: know that information is being given to private parties, did
Speaker 1: we expect that such information would be so easily obtained
Speaker 1: by government authorities? And I think that's a very different question.
Speaker 1: So in this case, a man accused of a bank
Speaker 1: robbery is challenging the use of data from a GEO
Speaker 1: warrant as evidence in his indictment. And it's the first
Speaker 1: such federal court challenge. So it's the first case that
Speaker 1: I'm aware of. It's not the first case where location
Speaker 1: data is part of an indictment. I'm very important. Supreme
Speaker 1: Court case Carpenter of the United States, which happened just
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago, was based on historical sell
Speaker 1: site location. So police have been using location information from
Speaker 1: cell service companies, from Internet companies for some time, and
Speaker 1: Google said, I think it was last month that geo
Speaker 1: fence warrants now make up something like one quarter of
Speaker 1: all demands of information from the US government to these companies.
Speaker 1: And what that means is, it's not that the government
Speaker 1: is newly using location data in criminal prosecution. It's just
Speaker 1: that the technology that we have is so much better,
Speaker 1: better in the sense that these companies know exactly where
Speaker 1: we are and have the ability to track us in
Speaker 1: real time. So of course the government is going to
Speaker 1: want to use it when trying to arrest suspects or
Speaker 1: crashed down on crime. What is the defendant's basic argument
Speaker 1: about the constitutionality of the warrant? So the argument is
Speaker 1: that the quantity and quality of their multiple arguments, but
Speaker 1: one of the arguments is that the quantity and quality
Speaker 1: of the information that can be provided through geo fence
Speaker 1: warrant is just way too significant, way too much. Normally,
Speaker 1: when you get a warrant, the police will go I
Speaker 1: need a warrant to search your home. I have a
Speaker 1: warrant to search your office. Right there is a finite
Speaker 1: amount of information that's there if police get a warrant
Speaker 1: to search your office and there's a computer in there,
Speaker 1: Normally you have to get a separate warrant to search
Speaker 1: the computer. But a geofense warrant really is it's almost
Speaker 1: like a seven dragnet about a person that allows law
Speaker 1: enforcement to not just see the papers that are in
Speaker 1: the death, it allows them to see pretty much everywhere
Speaker 1: you go, everything you do for however long the warrant lasts,
Speaker 1: and sometimes you can get a significant warrant. And in
Speaker 1: the case the United States Carpenter, the Supreme Court was
Speaker 1: very skeptical of that, very skeptical of these seven dragnet
Speaker 1: surveillance tools, not just because there wasn't warrant, there wasn't
Speaker 1: a warrant, but because of the quantity and the quality
Speaker 1: of the information. So in defending the GEO warrant in
Speaker 1: this case, the Justice Department argues that Google users give
Speaker 1: up their expectation of privacy when they let the company
Speaker 1: collect data on their phone. Do you agree with that, Well,
Speaker 1: that's what the government argued. But as I was saying earlier,
Speaker 1: it's a very big difference first between giving information to
Speaker 1: a private company in order to gain some benefits like
Speaker 1: be able to find your way in a new city
Speaker 1: through Google Maps and having the government be able to
Speaker 1: have access to that information. So that's one of the differences. Second,
Speaker 1: I think it's just plain wrong, even if the government
Speaker 1: were not involved in the story, it's just plain wrong
Speaker 1: to say that we give up our privacy rights the
Speaker 1: moment we share information with a third party. If that
Speaker 1: were true, then the moment we walked out of our houses,
Speaker 1: we would lose our privacy rights. The moment we spoke
Speaker 1: to another person, we would lose our privacy rights. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, the US government, Facebook, Google, large tech companies
Speaker 1: make that exact argument in court all the time. Our
Speaker 1: users have no privacy rights. Individuals have no privacy rights
Speaker 1: because they voluntarily shared information. It's a cynical loy that
Speaker 1: is based on American laws tradition of seeing privacy in
Speaker 1: terms of control. It's a longstanding discourse of what privacy means.
Speaker 1: That is, privacy is the ability to control the dissemination
Speaker 1: of information about you. That definition undergird so much of
Speaker 1: privacy law, whether it's privacy we have against another private
Speaker 1: party like a tech company or another person or the government.
Speaker 1: But the implication of that is that if privacy is
Speaker 1: about controlling the dissemination of your information. Once you share
Speaker 1: that information with a third party, you lost control of it.
Speaker 1: So it's a weak form of privacy that the government
Speaker 1: and tech companies have been taking advantage of for so long.
Speaker 1: That's why we feel like we have no privacy, despite
Speaker 1: all these companies saying we care about your privacy and
Speaker 1: these privacy wizards and these cookie banners. At its heart,
Speaker 1: the law itself is undermining our ability to TechEd our
Speaker 1: privacy because of this individuated control based definition. So in
Speaker 1: another case, concerning a search for suspects in ten fires
Speaker 1: in the Chicago area, a federal judge approved a government
Speaker 1: request for location data from Google. What kind of a
Speaker 1: test did that judge use? Normally, warrants are given where
Speaker 1: there's probable cause that criminal activities occur. So on any
Speaker 1: given case, you know, a judge will get evidence before
Speaker 1: when the when the proper party applies for a warrant,
Speaker 1: and they'll see, Okay, here's the information. This is the
Speaker 1: data that law enforcement wants in order to rest or
Speaker 1: find more information. And therefore, okay, let me determine if
Speaker 1: there's probable cause based on the information before me. So
Speaker 1: that's a one off decision, right, Judges when when determining warrants,
Speaker 1: don't make decisions about how one particular case or one
Speaker 1: particular motion in front of them affects the wider system
Speaker 1: or implicates the wider system of surveillance. So it's a
Speaker 1: one off. The nature of a one off decision is
Speaker 1: that it is made in a vacuum. It doesn't notice
Speaker 1: or doesn't know that, or doesn't care really that the
Speaker 1: quality and the quantity of information that a geofense warrant
Speaker 1: or another database more warrant for data um will gather
Speaker 1: so significant of information that the entire for that the
Speaker 1: person's everything about the person, not just about their criminal activity.
Speaker 1: Potential criminal activity is subject to be known by the police.
Speaker 1: So it's very easy to approve one of these warrants
Speaker 1: considering that the surveillance context in which it sits is
Speaker 1: not really part of the judges determined determination. What's really
Speaker 1: part of the judges determination is just is there a
Speaker 1: probable cause here and does this warrant make sense? And
Speaker 1: it's a lot easier to make that choice than it
Speaker 1: is to say, well, this is part of a larger
Speaker 1: system of surveillance that is uh problematic for the fourth amend?
Speaker 1: Do you have any reason to think that the judge
Speaker 1: in this case is going to rule that the warrant
Speaker 1: was invalid? Well, I can hope. Um. There's a forthcoming
Speaker 1: paper in the Harvard Law Review by professor at the
Speaker 1: University of Utah named Matthew Tocsin, and he's done a
Speaker 1: really great job of taking every single post Carpenter case
Speaker 1: and analyzing how court lower courts, tel courts, disrecord, state courts,
Speaker 1: how they've interpreted Carpenter. And this is going to be
Speaker 1: another one of those data points, because here the judge
Speaker 1: has the opportunity to look at this surveillance, look at
Speaker 1: what the police asked for and what they did, and
Speaker 1: see has this surveillance gathered so much information the so
Speaker 1: called aggregation theory of surveillance or mosaic theory of surveillance,
Speaker 1: such that it provided no privacy whatsoever. When more surveillance
Speaker 1: over and above what would be necessary or what would
Speaker 1: be expected as would be necessary for this particular criminal investigation,
Speaker 1: Now it's kimely possible that the court will you take
Speaker 1: Professor Toxsin's advice and do a nuanced analysis, But more
Speaker 1: often than not, the federal courts, which definitely have a
Speaker 1: conservative tilt, more often than not side with law enforcements.
Speaker 1: So maybe that's just my cynicism, but I don't really
Speaker 1: expect much of this federal bench. But the appellate courts
Speaker 1: of the Supreme Court, you know, when it comes to
Speaker 1: these issues, they don't always fall down traditional ideological lines.
Speaker 1: So it's an open question what might happen as more
Speaker 1: courts start to interpret or think about the constitutionality of
Speaker 1: these types of warms. Are legal experts in the privacy
Speaker 1: area paying attention to this case? Sure, I mean, these
Speaker 1: kind of cases are always come before, we always come
Speaker 1: us our death. We're whether we're teaching about it or
Speaker 1: um talking about it or using them as example of
Speaker 1: in our research. The interesting thing about geo fence warrants
Speaker 1: is that it implicates both It's interesting for scholars who
Speaker 1: scholars of the Fourth Amendment, so government access to information,
Speaker 1: but also people like me, who I mean I do
Speaker 1: I focus much more on the relationships between individuals and
Speaker 1: private companies because this source of the source of all
Speaker 1: this data is not the government gathering the information on
Speaker 1: its own. It implicates our expectations about what a private
Speaker 1: company like Google will do with our data or what
Speaker 1: goes on when we make decisions about the tools that
Speaker 1: we use, the apps that we use, and so forth.
Speaker 1: That really has nothing to do with the government. But
Speaker 1: yet our system allows the government great access to that.
Speaker 1: So I would expect not just Professor Tompson, but I
Speaker 1: would expect that a lot of law professors and a
Speaker 1: lot of legal advocates and pol privacy advocates. I think
Speaker 1: me about this. Albert fox Cohn, who's a privacy advocate,
Speaker 1: runs a nonprofit in New York City. He's written several
Speaker 1: um poignant and uh cojen op eds about g f
Speaker 1: N S Warren's showing how dangerous they are. So this
Speaker 1: is a hot topic right now, and hopefully judges are
Speaker 1: taking note. You've written a book, Industry Unbound, the inside
Speaker 1: story of privacy, data and corporate power. So let me
Speaker 1: ask you, what can the average person do to protect
Speaker 1: their privacy? Because using Google Maps as an example, it
Speaker 1: makes it so easy to get around anywhere in the world. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's hard to give that up for the concept of privacy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I get this question a lot, and you're right. I mean,
Speaker 1: I barely know how to get from place A to B.
Speaker 1: So I use Google Maps all the time. But I'll
Speaker 1: play a little bit of a law professor game here
Speaker 1: and say that is the wrong question. In fact, what
Speaker 1: can the individual will do is exactly the question that
Speaker 1: companies want us to be asking ourselves, because it implies
Speaker 1: that protecting privacy is something that we can do in
Speaker 1: the world in informational capitalism, in the world that privacy
Speaker 1: law and the law has set up, almost nothing an
Speaker 1: individual can do can protect their privacy. I'm sorry to say,
Speaker 1: but there is nothing that we as individuals can do. Sure,
Speaker 1: you can use a VPN, a virtual private network, You
Speaker 1: can use Firefox instead of Google Chrome, you can say
Speaker 1: no to all personalization cookies. All of that is great.
Speaker 1: Anyone can do that. If you want to go through
Speaker 1: the work of doing all those toggles, your Internet experience
Speaker 1: is not going to change very much, and some of
Speaker 1: your privacy will be protected. But all of that is
Speaker 1: marginal because even if you do all those things, these
Speaker 1: companies are still collecting terabytes of data about you passively.
Speaker 1: Even if you don't accept cookies, you're on their website.
Speaker 1: They know where are, they know what hardware you're using,
Speaker 1: they know where your cursor is they know your purchase
Speaker 1: histories because companies can buy it from data brokers. So
Speaker 1: it's the wrong question to ask what we need to do.
Speaker 1: The only way that individuals will ever be empowered to
Speaker 1: protect their privacy is when the current political economy of
Speaker 1: big tech in the data economy is overturned, or is rejected,
Speaker 1: or is completely reformed such that we actually do have
Speaker 1: those tools. So, although that's very cynical, what we really
Speaker 1: should be asking ourselves is what can we do to
Speaker 1: ensure structural reform, whether that means voting for the right
Speaker 1: political leaders who will actually pass honest reform versus people
Speaker 1: who only talk about big tech for conservative political gain,
Speaker 1: whether it's not just a political leaders that we vote for,
Speaker 1: but what happens in our own schools, Like are we
Speaker 1: okay with our employers, how having a contract with Google
Speaker 1: to allow us to Google docs while also feeling data
Speaker 1: in the process, or would we be more well served
Speaker 1: with a similar product that doesn't include rampant data collection
Speaker 1: like Google Docs. So those are the kind of things
Speaker 1: that we really need to be thinking of, and we
Speaker 1: also need to create a larger ground. So will a
Speaker 1: larger movement for privacy reform because without that, politicians are
Speaker 1: just going to take more big tech money and maintain
Speaker 1: the status quo with some changes around the edges. The
Speaker 1: book is based on four years of research. Tell us
Speaker 1: what you did during those four years, who you talk to,
Speaker 1: how you've got access? Sure, So the book Industry on
Speaker 1: Bound is based on nearly four years of field work.
Speaker 1: And it's not four years five days a year, but
Speaker 1: it's a It's based on interviews with current and four
Speaker 1: UMER employees and current and firmer employees of big tech companies,
Speaker 1: and that include engineers, UM, privacy professionals, product managers, lawyers,
Speaker 1: as well as interviews with law firm partners and associates
Speaker 1: and UM as well, in addition reviews of confidential documents
Speaker 1: that have been redacted. I also had the opportunity to
Speaker 1: be embedded for a couple of days around a week
Speaker 1: er and so in one case inside UM several medium
Speaker 1: size and small tech companies just to see how they
Speaker 1: run their meetings and UH interview some of their people
Speaker 1: talk about how they do privacy law on the ground.
Speaker 1: Getting access was really hard. I had a lot of
Speaker 1: companies just say no, we're not interested in this. So
Speaker 1: I had to find other routes, including snowball sampling, finding
Speaker 1: social network that gives me access to people who formerly
Speaker 1: worked as a company. In fact, Facebook just refused to apply.
Speaker 1: Google insisted that if I talked to anyone, it has
Speaker 1: to be on deep background. I can't quote anyone, And
Speaker 1: in fact Facebook UM eventually replied to multiple emails later
Speaker 1: several years down the line and said that if we
Speaker 1: talk to you, we have to get We require approval
Speaker 1: of all quotes from Facebook employees, as well as approval
Speaker 1: of the manuscript. And whereas that might be that kind
Speaker 1: of access might be helpful for some researchers, that violates
Speaker 1: research ethics. So I ended up having to do a
Speaker 1: lot more work to get access from the back end,
Speaker 1: like through former employees or through current employees at conferences
Speaker 1: UM something we call interface ethnography, where companies have open
Speaker 1: um events where they talk about their products, where you're
Speaker 1: able to ask questions. Those kind of tools, those kind
Speaker 1: of methods really helps paint a picture UM that maybe
Speaker 1: sometimes the company, an official tour by the company would
Speaker 1: not have so correct me if I'm wrong, But you
Speaker 1: contend that the systems the tech companies have to comply
Speaker 1: with privacy laws are designed to intentionally undermine our privacy.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, there's there's. The argument is broader than that.
Speaker 1: The argument is that the systems in place coops both
Speaker 1: privacy law and people who are who see themselves as
Speaker 1: privacy advocates that are working on the inside on on
Speaker 1: these on these compliance on compliance elements are on design. Essentially,
Speaker 1: the organizational structures inside companies take engineers, privacy professionals, salespeople, designers, advocate,
Speaker 1: um executives, and whomever, whatever they're reasons for coming to
Speaker 1: the company, and even if they care so much about privacy,
Speaker 1: going in the systems inside the company, there their control
Speaker 1: over discourse, their control over the definitions of privacy, their
Speaker 1: control over how people do their work, their control over
Speaker 1: how design functions, and the relationships between designers and lawyers
Speaker 1: and designers and privacy professionals, and the organizational barriers that
Speaker 1: companies put in front of privacy professionals, and the way
Speaker 1: they habituate privacy workers into doing into thinking about privacy
Speaker 1: and narrow ways all of these things, it almost doesn't
Speaker 1: matter if someone is a privacy advocate. It channels all
Speaker 1: work into data extracted ends and when a system of
Speaker 1: law like we have privacy law like the gdp R
Speaker 1: in Europe and all of the proposals that have been
Speaker 1: introduced as the US Congress and the state. When a
Speaker 1: system of law is based on third party compliance, when
Speaker 1: it's based on internal structures to fill out forms, to
Speaker 1: keep records, to fill out to complete privacy impact assessments,
Speaker 1: a system that co opts those, uh, those people and
Speaker 1: those tools is a system that does not protect privacy
Speaker 1: at all. So in that sense, yes, the systems that
Speaker 1: these companies have created are built to purposely undermine our privacy.
Speaker 1: Al Right, Often we get alerts from Google and other
Speaker 1: sites saying we value your privacy, go through these steps
Speaker 1: to help protect your information. I mean, should we bother
Speaker 1: with that? Yeah? Well, part of what that does is
Speaker 1: it create, it maintains or or maintains this myth that
Speaker 1: protecting your privacy is something that is your individual responsibility.
Speaker 1: It's like you have to do the work. You you
Speaker 1: have to click these buttons. Setting aside the fact that
Speaker 1: a lot of these companies don't even provide you with
Speaker 1: the options of doing that. When Google sends you an email,
Speaker 1: it sends you an email and says we value your privacy.
Speaker 1: It's mostly just to notify you have changes the Private
Speaker 1: to their privacy policy that you really have no option
Speaker 1: to opt out. Right, It's just here's the deal, and
Speaker 1: this is what's happening. But as an aside, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's part of a larger campaign, a larger purpose is
Speaker 1: to make you think the privacy is something that we control.
Speaker 1: That these toggle buttons. Every time you go onto your
Speaker 1: iPhone and toggle the button you green to gray or
Speaker 1: great to green, you're turning on something, you're turning off something,
Speaker 1: you're protecting where that information goes. Even though that is
Speaker 1: more of a performance that performance. This this just the
Speaker 1: action of clicking, okay, the action of toggling these buttons.
Speaker 1: It habituates us into thinking that privacy is something that
Speaker 1: we're on, we're in control of, that we're we're in
Speaker 1: charge of when it's back. The options that they give
Speaker 1: us are so minimal, or they're so complex and so
Speaker 1: difficult to actually run through. Imagine trying to manage all
Speaker 1: of your privacy, all the privacy toggles on every app
Speaker 1: on your phone right now, or on every website that
Speaker 1: you've ever visited. That's impossible to do. Yet the company
Speaker 1: frames it in this empowering language. We're putting you in control.
Speaker 1: That kind of control is anything but control. Every time
Speaker 1: the government is going to enforce privacy, let's say the
Speaker 1: settlement agreements they've made with Facebook, Facebook still violates privacy
Speaker 1: rights and then makes another settlement agreement with the FTC.
Speaker 1: Is anyone monitoring what these companies do? Yeah, so the FTC,
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right to note that Facebook is a serial
Speaker 1: violator of not only our privacy, but supposed consent decree,
Speaker 1: but consent increase from the SEC. It's serial violation of
Speaker 1: It just goes to show you how much FTC and
Speaker 1: agreements have been just slaps on the risk. The FEC
Speaker 1: is a weak agency when it comes down to it.
Speaker 1: It's a weak agency. It has better appointees now under
Speaker 1: the Biden administration who hope to empower it, but it's
Speaker 1: a weak agency that for the last thirty years, most
Speaker 1: of the people who sat on the FTC have seen
Speaker 1: their role. It seen part of their role as not
Speaker 1: not to protect privacy, but to protect privacy only so
Speaker 1: much as it doesn't harm innovation. A lot of FTC
Speaker 1: commissioners to said part of their job is to maintain innovation,
Speaker 1: to tell to listen to companies and say and listen
Speaker 1: to them when they say that, oh no, we can't
Speaker 1: do this or don't require us to do this because
Speaker 1: of a harm innovation. And that goes a law that
Speaker 1: goes very far to and I quote some of these
Speaker 1: FEC commissioners and lobbyists and so forth in the book,
Speaker 1: it goes very far to show why the SEC has
Speaker 1: been so so weak. UM and these consent a crees
Speaker 1: allow the company to get off scott free because it's
Speaker 1: basically a settlement. There's no order, there's no UM, there's
Speaker 1: no requirements other than complete this audit or fill out
Speaker 1: this document. But one of the things that I found
Speaker 1: during my research also UM Megan Gray, who used to
Speaker 1: be at Stanford Center for Internet and Society, also found
Speaker 1: this when she reviewed these audits. What I found were
Speaker 1: that a lot of these audit reports that were going
Speaker 1: to the SEC were just based on executive attestation, which
Speaker 1: means someone comes in that the company hires and they
Speaker 1: say and they asked, have you complied with section three
Speaker 1: point five of the SEC consent decree? And the answer is,
Speaker 1: according to executives at attestation as attended in Exhibit I,
Speaker 1: the company is in compliance with deception. And then when
Speaker 1: you go to Exhibit I, all it is it's just
Speaker 1: the executive signing a letter thing. We're in compliance. So
Speaker 1: that system of audits of documents, which is what Julie
Speaker 1: Cohen has called tools on the periphery of the regulatory state,
Speaker 1: those aren't holding these companies speeds of the fire at all.
Speaker 1: It's performative. It's privacy lost theater, and companies have a
Speaker 1: strong interest in maintaining that theater. I'm making it look
Speaker 1: as good as they can and co opting and ensuring
Speaker 1: that their workers think that it's real stuff, but in
Speaker 1: fact it's really just a show for us and for regulators.
Speaker 1: So finally, what do you hope that readers will get
Speaker 1: from your book? I want readers to realize that the
Speaker 1: system is stacked against them even more than they think.
Speaker 1: I want privacy professionals to be more introspective about how
Speaker 1: their work inside tech companies is actually perpetuating data extraction.
Speaker 1: I want designers to realize that their employers are manipulating
Speaker 1: them into not caring about privacy. And I want politicians
Speaker 1: to realize that this whole system depends on companies and
Speaker 1: their lobby is influencing them to think about privacy and
Speaker 1: narrow ways. If there's one thing that I'd like to see,
Speaker 1: it's a change in discourse. I want us to stop thinking.
Speaker 1: I want us to all stop thinking about privacy as
Speaker 1: anything about control, individual control, or anything about choice. That's
Speaker 1: the fodder, that's the red meat for these tech companies.
Speaker 1: It's much better for us to think about privacy in
Speaker 1: terms of civil rights, in terms of equality and justice,
Speaker 1: in terms of um the the obligations of trust. As
Speaker 1: my colleagues Woody Hertzog and Neil Richards have argued, these
Speaker 1: more robust concepts, the more so show concepts of seeing
Speaker 1: ourselves as part of a larger group, as opposed to
Speaker 1: thinking that privacy is something we do against others or
Speaker 1: against the world. So as soon as we start, as
Speaker 1: soon as we stopped talking about privacy in terms of
Speaker 1: control and choice, and as soon as that discourse gains prominence,
Speaker 1: it's almost like this house of cards that I talked
Speaker 1: about in the book is going to start falling apart,
Speaker 1: and then we can start passing better laws, and then
Speaker 1: we can have a then we can have Are these
Speaker 1: laws not depend on the completely captured industry of most
Speaker 1: privacy professionals. Thanks. Sorry. That's Ari Ezra Waldman of Northeastern
Speaker 1: University Law School. His new book, Industry Unbound, The inside
Speaker 1: story of privacy, data and corporate power. I'm June Grass,
Speaker 1: and you're listening to Bloomberg