Investigative journalist Julia Angwin is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing corporate corruption. Now at the New York-based nonprofit journalism center ProPublica, she’s been writing about the expansion of corporate and governmental surveillance, and the concomitant loss of individual privacy. The U. of C. alum’s sold-out Chicago Humanities Festival lecture “Citizens Under Surveillance” will draw on her 2014 book Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.
It was a mixed bag. There are some very basic things that I realized I could do better—like using strong passwords and up-to-date software, and not clicking on the phishing e-mails. But there were a lot of things that I could not get out of. For instance, there are all these companies that collect information about you. They’re called data brokers. They buy publicly available information, and your magazine subscriptions, and your property records, and they make them into a package and sell them to anyone who wants them.
And cookies?
There were some positive things. Like I quit using Google search. That was much easier than I thought. I use something called DuckDuckGo. They don’t store any information about what you’re searching for. When you’re typing your search in, it doesn’t actually fill in the rest of the words for you the way Google does. And I stopped using Gmail. I switched to a privacy-protecting e-mail called Riseup [riseup.net] that I really like. So I found some options. That’s why I say it’s a mixed bag: there were some things I could do, and there are some areas where we just don’t have a legal infrastructure or a technical infrastructure that supports privacy.
Where does that leave us?
