The University of Hamburg 2021

Speaking before the audience at the IAPP Data Protection Congress in Brussels, keynoter Woody Hartzog made a challenging assertion: "Control is the wrong goal for privacy by design, perhaps the wrong goal for data protection in general." But isn't control a central tenet of good privacy? It sure is. But it shouldn't be, the author of "Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies" argued. While everyone emphasizes "control" of personal data as core to privacy, 

In this talk describing his book, "Privacy’s Blueprint," Woodrow Hartzog pushes back against this state of affairs, arguing that the law should require software and hardware makers to respect privacy in the design of their products. Current legal doctrine treats technology as though it were value-neutral: only the user decides whether it functions for good or ill. But this is not so. 

The Center for Democracy & Technology hosted a conversation about design and technology with Northeastern University Professor of Law and Computer Science Woodrow Hartzog, who introduced his new book, "Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies."

The failure of anonymisation has led to a narrative in the debate over privacy and open data that sometimes pits these two values against each other, as though privacy and openness are inherently in conflict. In this talk, Woodrow Hartzog will argue that in order to reconcile this perceived tension, we must better define the notions of both ‘open data’ and ‘privacy in datasets’ in our law and policy to accommodate reasonable risk management techniques.