POLISCI 28Q: Is Privacy Dead? Privacy, Surveillance, and Freedom in the Digital Age

Course Description

Suppose that someone is listening to your phone calls and reading your emails, but you never find out and your life is never affected. What reason do you have to complain? Does it make a difference if it’s a neighbor, a lover, the state, or an algorithm listening in? What if you are the one posting the information on Facebook? Do we have a right not to be tracked, photographed, or surveilled in public? In this seminar, students will examine these questions and many more having to do with the value of privacy in the digital age. They will have the opportunity to develop their own answers by drawing on a field of theories about privacy, anonymity, and surveillance, and they can expect to leave the seminar with a better view of the ethical and political problems facing their own era of technological change.

This seminar will serve as an introduction to the wide range of ethical and political questions concerning privacy and technology, as well as an introduction to the practice of philosophy. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to questions of privacy, surveillance, and freedom in the digital age, with readings drawn from moral and political philosophy, political science, sociology, law, media studies, and the arts. Assessing what others have said and thought about privacy (writ large) will be important in developing our own views. Just as important, however, we will refract these arguments and observations through our own experiences with concealment and exposure, letting the theory inform our lives and vice versa. This is what I mean when I say this seminar will offer an introduction to the practice of philosophy. Students can expect to see improvement in their skills of critical reasoning and argumentative writing, and to leave the seminar with a sharpened faculty of critical and moral vision.