January 28, 2015
By Caroline Perry
Privacy isn’t what it used to be. Post-Sony, post-Snowden, we know our digital world is insecure, yet most of us continue to share a vast amount of personal information over networks. Balancing anxiety with convenience, autonomy with value, we negotiate a new definition of privacy every time we download a new app.
“It’s not the right to be left alone anymore,” said Lee Rainie ’73, the Pew Research Center’s Director of Internet, Science, and Technology Research, speaking at Harvard on January 23. “It’s the right to be in control of what people understand about you, … what kind of sharing is done, who has access to your data, and if you can correct mistakes that others make about you.”