CITP Seminar: Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power

Why are there so many privacy laws and so many privacy professionals but no privacy on the ground? With research based on interviews with scores of tech employees and internal documents outlining corporate strategies, Industry Unbound reveals that companies don’t just lobby against privacy law; they also manipulate how we think about privacy, how their employees approach their work, and how they weaken the law to make data-extractive products the norm. In contrast to those who claim that privacy law is getting stronger, Industry Unbound shows why recent shifts in privacy law are precisely the kinds of changes that corporations want and how even those who think of themselves as privacy advocates often unwittingly facilitate corporate malfeasance.

Bio: Ari, a leading authority on law, technology and society, is a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. He directs the School of Law’s Center for Law, Information and Creativity (CLIC). Ari studies asymmetrical power relations created and entrenched by law and technology, with particular focus on privacy, online harassment, free speech and the LGBTQ community.

He is a widely published scholar, including two books, Privacy As Trust: Information Privacy for an Information Age (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Industry Unbound: The Inside Story of Privacy, Data, and Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and more than 30 articles published in leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals, including the California Law Review, the Michigan Law Review, the Washington University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Iowa Law Review, Indiana Law Journal and Law & Social Inquiry, among others. He has also written for the popular press, publishing in The New York Times, Slate, New York Daily News and The Advocate, among others, and serves on the editorial board of Law & Social Inquiry (LSI), a peer-reviewed journal that publishes work on sociolegal issues across multiple disciplines, including anthropology, criminology, economics, history, law, philosophy, political science, sociology and social psychology.

He is the founder of @Legally_Queer, a social media project that educates the public about the history, present and future of LGBTQ freedom. Providing accessible summaries and context to LGBTQ cases and laws decided or enacted “on this date in history,” Legally Queer seeks to engage both the LGBTQ community and the general public in the role of the courts in equality and social justice.

Ari was previously the Microsoft Visiting Professor at the Center for Information Technology Policy and visiting professor at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He served as a professor of law at New York Law School, where he was the founding director of the Innovation Center for Law and Technology and founded the Institute for CyberSafety, a research and clinical program helping victims of online harassment obtain justice. He has also served as a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School and Fordham University School of Law. He clerked for Judge Scott W. Stucky at the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an A.B. magna cum laude, from Harvard College.

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To request accommodations for a disability please contact Jean Butcher, butcher@princeton.edu, at least one week prior to the event.

This seminar will be recorded.