What kind of privacy do we want to have? What makes others’ knowledge about us turn from everyday acceptable to weird and creepy? Woody Hartzog talks with us about the difficulties of maintaining privacy, whatever it should be, online and in social networks. We’re used to the cheap obscurity and fleetingness of our physical lives, but it’s cheap and tempting to know more about others online than they’d like. Can we design platforms to deliver the individual obscurity we’ve enjoyed in the past? Conversation ranges between celebrities and privacy, searchability, giving up on hiding that we’re all gross and weird, our many identities, the problem of dumb teenagers, protected Twitter accounts, internet bad guys, and naked, dancing Buddhist monks.

This show’s links:


Woody Hartzog’s faculty profile and writing
Philosophy Bites, Shaun Nichols on Death and the Self
Woodrow Hartzog, Chain-Link Confidentiality
Joshua Fairfield, BitProperty
About security through obscurity
Woodrow Hartzog and Frederic Stutzman, Obscurity by Design
Daniel Solve, A Taxonomy of Privacy
David Brin, The Transparent Society
Cass Sunstein, Republic.com
About the narcissism of small differences
Richard Posner, The Right of Privacy
Neil Richards, Intellectual Privacy (the article) and Intellectual Privacy (the book)
Library of Congress, Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress
Twitter, About Public and Protected Tweets; see also Greg Kumparak, Twitter Bug Allowed Some Protected Accounts to Be Read by Unapproved Followers
About Yik Yak
Mike Isaac, A Look Behind the Snapchat Photo Leak Claims
In the Matter of Red Zone Investment Group, Inc., an FTC case involving, among other things, a fake windows registration window
Woodrow Hartzog, Website Design as Contract
About the Whisper app
About the Sears Holdings Management Corp. case before the FTC
Special Guest: Woodrow Hartzog.