Data Privacy, Ethics and Society

1. 1. What privacy is, and why it's contested

   You arrive certain you know what privacy is. You’ll leave less sure — which is the point. Two real, current cases pull the ground out from under the easy definition.

2. 2. Ethical frameworks as tools, not doctrines

   Four lenses for reasoning about privacy when your intuitions can’t tell you why something is wrong — plus a quick map of the data lifecycle we’ll use all term — and what to do when the lenses disagree.

3. 3. Consent, collection, and the limits of agreement

   The mechanism everyone pretends solves privacy — “I agree” — and why it can’t. Two contrasts: the app you didn’t read, and the car you didn’t know was listening.

4. 4. Privacy-enhancing technology and its human limits

   When consent fails, the next hope is that the technology protects you — anonymization, privacy tools, safeguards. This week we test that hope, and then ask the harder question underneath every failure so far.

5. 5. Data brokers and the invisible profile

   Last week ended by relocating the problem from you to the structure. This week you meet the structure: a $389-billion industry that assembles a detailed portrait of you from scattered pieces, sells it for pennies, and answers to no relationship with you at all.

6. 6. When innocence stops protecting you Pillar

   You used to be able to disappear into a crowd. This week is about the moment that stopped being true — when being unremarkable, blameless, careful, no longer keeps anyone from finding you. The first face of the course’s central break.

7. 7. The consent you can't afford to refuse

   You can leave an app. You can barely live without a car. You cannot easily not work. This week is surveillance you agreed to because the alternative was no paycheck — the nakedest coercion in the course, and the one most of you live inside right now.

8. 8. The end of withholding Pillar

   Everything so far has been about what you hand over — knowingly, unknowingly, or because you couldn’t refuse. This week is different. This week a machine reads a true fact about you off a signal you already gave, a fact no human can see in it, a fact you did not know was there. The second face of the course’s central break — and the one that finishes it.

9. 9. When the machine decides

   The moment the machine stops watching and starts deciding — the interview, the loan, the apartment, the sentence, the benefits that keep you housed — wearing the one disguise bias has never had before: the look of objectivity. Phase 4 opens on discrimination that arrives as math.

10. 14. Arguing the human cost
    Students take a live case and defend a position on its human harm, applying the course's lenses without resolving the tension too cleanly.