Join the Stigler Center on Monday, May 11, for a conversation with The Markup’s editor-in-chief Julia Angwin and University of Chicago Law professor Lior Strahilevitz, moderated by The Intercept’s editor-in-chief Betsy Reed, on the Covid-19 epidemic and what the future may hold for surveillance and privacy.
As the Covid-19 crisis grips the world, new questions arise about the use of surveillance to combat the disease—and the implications for privacy.
With governments around the world rushing to develop mechanisms that could use cellphone data to track the location of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus, privacy advocates caution about the risks related to this level of surveillance. Is it acceptable for governments to track the spread of the virus through the use of personal geolocation and health data? And what happens when tech giants enter the fray and develop their own contact tracing apps, as Google and Apple are now doing? Can companies whose business models rely on surveillance be trusted not to use sensitive data for commercial purposes? And can there be a balance between the need to trace and eradicate the virus and the need to maintain some level of transparency and control over how private information is collected and stored?
Join the Stigler Center on Monday, May 11, for a conversation with The Markup’s editor-in-chief Julia Angwin and University of Chicago Law professor Lior Strahilevitz, moderated by The Intercept’s editor-in-chief Betsy Reed, on the Covid-19 epidemic and what the future may hold for surveillance and privacy.
Before the event, you can also read the privacy portion of the Stigler Center’s Report on Digital Platforms here.
About the event’s speakers:
Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impacts of technology on society. Julia was a previously a senior reporter at the independent news organization ProPublica, where she led an investigative team that was a Finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2017 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2018. From 2000 to 2013, she was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she led a privacy investigative team that was a Finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2011 and won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2010. In 2003, she was on a team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for coverage of corporate corruption. She is also the author of Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books, 2014) and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (Random House, 2009). She earned a BA in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.
Lior Strahilevitz is the Sidley Austin Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He received his BA in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, graduating with highest honors. He received his JD in 1999 from Yale Law School, where he served as Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. Following his graduation, he clerked for Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall on the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He then practiced law in Seattle before joining the law school faculty in 2002. He was tenured in 2007 and served as the Law School’s Deputy Dean from 2010 to 2012. In 2011, he was named the inaugural Sidley Austin Professor of Law. He was elected to the American Law Institute in 2015. He is a two-time winner of the Law School graduating students’ award for teaching excellence. His teaching and research interests include privacy, property and land use, trade secrets, contracts, and motorist behavior. Strahilevitz has also served as the chair of the subcommittee on Privacy and Data Protection of the Stigler Center Committee on Digital Platforms.
Betsy Reed (moderator) became Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept in 2015. Since then, The Intercept has earned multiple awards — and millions of readers — with its fearless reporting on a range of issues, from war, surveillance and US politics to the environment, technology, prisons, the death penalty, the media and more. Among the awards The Intercept has won under Reed’s tenure are a George Polk Award, a National Magazine Award, a Sidney Hillman Prize, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Prior to joining The Intercept, Reed was Executive Editor of The Nation.
The webinar will take place from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. CDT via Zoom. Register to Join the Webinar.
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