Is Privacy Dead? Privacy, Surveillance, and Freedom in the Digital Age

Catalog description

If someone is listening to our phone calls and reading our emails but we never find out, do we have reason to complain? If we do, how do we say that the snooping affected us? Does it make a difference if it’s a neighbor, a lover, the state, or an algorithm listening in? What if we’re the ones posting the information on Facebook, or if instead of Orwell’s Big Brother watching one’s every move it’s the audience of CBS’s reality show “Big Brother”? In this course students will examine these questions and more, and in the process will develop their own answers by drawing on the field of theories about privacy and surveillance. Students can expect to leave this course with a sharper view of the ethical and political problems facing their own era of rampant technological change.