I have the honor to be teaching a class at the University of Washington on the policy and ethics of information management. Obviously, issues related to privacy and surveillance are on heavy rotation within the topics that are being discussed by my students, who aspire to be product developers, cybersecurity professionals, and user experience designers. It’s timely that Data Privacy Week falls within this quarter so that we can have a relevant opportunity to examine the ethical issues of safeguarding data and enabling trust.
During the first class meeting a couple weeks ago, however, I was surprised by how some students seemed unconcerned about privacy because they felt that it is no longer something that we can hope to achieve in modern life.
I didn’t go into this quarter assuming that I was going to have to make a case for why privacy still matters in 2025. And perhaps that was naive of me.
While the City of Seattle boasts one the country’s first municipal privacy policies, and we continue to have a robust Privacy Program that is engaged at virtually every level of what we do as an organization, it’s easy to forget that a lot of people either don’t think about privacy or believe it’s no longer possible to achieve it.
As early as 2017, a Pew Research study showed that over 60% of Americans reported feeling no sense of control over their personal data and didn’t believe it’s possible to go through life without being tracked by companies and governments. As of 2023, that percentage is now over 70%. Additional recent research has shown that “Generation Z” (the generation that most of my students belong to) are much more willing to share data in exchange for services, and believe that they have no choice.
It is my renewed goal for this quarter to center class discussions on why privacy still matters, especially to the most vulnerable members of our community. These students are members of the up-and-coming generation who will likely end up in positions to make decisions about data collection, retention, and disclosure in the online products and services that we will all be interacting with in the coming decades.
I have spoken to the class already about how it is a privilege to not care about one’s privacy; or to believe, as many do, that as long as you have nothing to hide there’s no risk. I will stress to them that it is an important ethical choice for information management professionals to care about those who lack such privilege, as well as highlight why we should resist the normalization of surveillance in a free and democratic society.
I also want to demonstrate to them that there are things that can be used to gain more control over one’s data within digital products. Tech companies have perhaps not made these controls easy to find or implement, and many of them are incomplete, but recent requirements to allow opting-out of tracking cookies, configuring data collection practices within apps and on mobile devices, and contacting companies to have your data removed are all still mostly, if imperfectly and confusingly, available to users. There needs to more consumer education around those options and why they are important, and initiatives like Data Privacy Week can be an effective platform to highlight that.
While I was caught a bit off guard by realizing I had to go “back to basics” in this class, I can convert this into a series of “teachable moments” thanks, in large part, to the professional experiences I’ve had working for organizations like Seattle IT that have foregrounded issues of data privacy. I feel that I have the tools and the access to resources to lead those important discussions.
Oh, and, of course, I’m going to have our Chief Privacy Officer Ginger Armbruster come to class this week and show them what’s what!