Ep. 2 | The History of Privacy (Guest: Cobun Zweifel-Keegan)

Show Transcript

Hello. My name is Donata Stroink-Skillrud, and welcome to the second episode of Privacy Laws, where we’ll be discussing the history of privacy. This is part one of our discussion on the history of privacy, where we’ll talk about the origins of privacy. In part two, we’ll discuss the history of modern privacy, and in part three, we’ll discuss privacy post-internet.

Even though most of us think of privacy as relatively modern concept, the truth is that humans have been thinking about privacy for a very long time. A lot of our views on privacy have changed over time, so it’s very interesting to see where privacy really started. So today I’ll be interviewing Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, who is the Managing Director in Washington, D.C. of the International Association of Privacy Professionals. Cobun is a graduate of the University of Colorado School of Law, where he served as the Executive Editor of the Colorado Technology Law Journal. He also served as the deputy director of privacy initiatives at BBB national programs, where he advised on frameworks such as the privacy shield and the cross-border privacy rules.

So, Cobun, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today. Please tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at the IAPP.

Of course. Well, thank you so much for having me Donata. This is very exciting. I’m looking forward to our conversation today. Yeah. As you already said, I’m the managing director of IAPP’s DC office. That means that I’m here to keep track of the ever-evolving policy conversation at the federal level in the United States. I’m here to make sure that we’re always connected to all the different stakeholders that weigh in on privacy policy and then try to bring all of that knowledge back to the privacy professionals around the world who are part of the IAPP’s family. So that’s sort of my role, focused on policy issues and getting to nerd out about privacy all the time and write a lot for the IAPP, which is a lot of fun.

I have to say I visit the IAPP website at least once per day. It’s definitely one of my favorite resources of all time to learn more about privacy. I have the CIPP designation, and I love the new sources, and I actually often use the job post to send to our law student volunteers at the ABA as well.

Can you tell us a bit more about how listeners can utilize the IAPP like certifications, keeping up to date with privacy news and finding a job in privacy?

Yeah, thanks for that question. I think the IAPP is the profession of privacy, right? It’s nothing without the entire community of 80,000 people or on the world that make up the privacy profession. So I agree. It’s a great resource, both in terms of the content that we try to curate and put out, but also just the community itself bringing everybody together.

Obviously, certifications are one way of demonstrating your passion for privacy. It helps to signal to people that you’ve focused and studied on the specific issues and are able to work in an applied setting. But there’s other ways to demonstrate that too. And we try to provide a platform for folks to connect and to engage and to learn about privacy in as many ways as possible.

Definitely there’s a job board, there’s online discussions, and there’s always fresh content, both from our editorial team, which puts out the daily Dashboard newsletter and other newsletters. I write a weekly column for our US Privacy Digest newsletter and then the research team, which is always putting out more in-depth white papers and legal analyses to help people keep up with more of the big picture issues that are always changing in privacy.

Yeah, I think some of my favorite resources of the IAPP are the State Privacy Bill Tracker, where you can view all of the bills that have currently been proposed and what stage they’re in and what they mean. And also the KnowledgeNets. So you have chapter meetings all over the US and the world where you can meet privacy professionals in your city, which I think is just really fun. And I’ve met so many really cool people through the KnowledgeNets as well, which has been awesome.

Yeah, I agree. That’s such a great part because we are always having it’s another way of like, so the IAPP doesn’t have to do all the work ourselves. We help to provide that platform, and the KnowledgeNets provide that local way for people to connect and hang out with each other.

Yeah, exactly. It’s a great way to make friends. I know the IAPP works on a lot of really cool projects, but what’s your favorite project that you’re currently working on right now?

I am very excited about the FTC’s ongoing rulemaking process. The US. Federal Trade Commission last year started their rulemaking on what they call commercial surveillance and data security. I really have loved diving into the comments that came in from across the community in response to the 99 questions that the FTC put out through that process.

It really is a great representation of everyone’s current thinking on privacy, from industry to civil society groups. There’s thousands of pages of really rich resources there, and I’ve had a couple of interns take looks at some of the themes from that, and I’m working hopefully to put out an analysis of one of those major themes, data minimization. That’s a project I’m pretty excited about, but yeah, a few irons in the fire, and it’s never a dull moment.

Well, I’m excited to see that analysis and read it in the future. That sounds really interesting. So bringing it back to us here, what was your first ever introduction to privacy in your life, and what did you learn from that introduction?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, it depends on how we think about it. I certainly became interested in privacy at a vague level pretty early on. I have a very unique name, even just my first name. The spelling and uniqueness of that name make it really easy to find me online. My digital presence is by design, but also almost impossible to avoid having some digital footprints. And it’s very easy to find me if you know just my first name. So that made me really interested in kind of how that works in practice and what kinds of controls I would be able to assert over that. And then in law school, I went to University of Colorado, as you mentioned, while Paul Ohm was teaching there.

And so I always joke that Paul is my privacy dad, but I think that was my first. He helped to focus my interest in technology policy into the privacy lens, and I think that was my first deep foray into privacy issues, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.

Yeah, I have a pretty unique name as well, so I definitely get that. If you search my name, you’ll definitely find me. There’s no doubt about that. So people have more common names, I think can have more anonymity because it could be anyone.

Right. Versus people with more unique names, it’s definitely you.

So what does privacy mean to you in general? What is privacy?

That’s very big question. I think, for me, privacy is this emergent property that comes about when we have other things in our lives. So when we are able to assert autonomy over our information and over who can see and interact with us, when we’re able to retain contextual integrity for interactions across different contexts, that’s when we have privacy. And so it’s this thing that emerges naturally through that.

And what we try to retain in the data privacy realm is that same feeling even in these spaces where data is flowing always and connecting across contacts.

I like that. I think I see it as deciding for yourself what level of interaction you want to have with someone. So even with these companies, what level of interaction do I want to have with Apple? And maybe I don’t want to have any interaction, so I can cut that off whenever I want.

Obviously, you can’t really do that now, or at least in most countries, you can’t do that now, but I think that how I would see it as well. So let’s get into the main topic of today, which is the history of privacy. And let’s go back to the very, very beginning.

Hunter gatherers. So we know that hunter gatherers, they lived and slept in the same beds or in the same huts. How did they view privacy? Did they have a desire for privacy?

Yeah, I would have to imagine they did. I think. I’m not an anthropologist, but I certainly read plenty of writings on early peoples.

I think a distinction we’d have to draw in this conversation as we go through time is that we’re starting thinking about physical privacy, for sure, like, privacy in the traditional sense of the ability to keep people from knowing things about yourself in the real world. And as we move forward, as technologies shift, we’re thinking more about data privacy, which is the practice that we’re focused on.

But, yeah, I think early peoples certainly understood privacy, especially even then, in the sense of keeping things safe and private in different contexts. Obviously, family groups are really important in that time of human history, and there’s big distinctions between what you might tell your tribe about and what you might try to keep from strangers. And I think, yeah, certainly there’s evidence of that retention of privacy between family groups and between tribes, and I think that starts even if cultural norms differ. Are those those part those are cultural universals, I think.

I think it’s interesting to think about, like, if you lived in a tribe that was just your family, or maybe 100 people at the most, those people probably knew quite a lot about you. But if you went 500 miles away, nobody even knew that you existed. So I think information didn’t flow to the extent nearly to the extent that it does now.

And I think overall, they probably had less privacy in the family context, but more privacy in the outside context than we do now.

Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s a lot of research on the types of the number of folks that we’re sort of wired to be able to have close relationships with. I think that number in the 100 to 200 range is what anthropologists seem to suggest is the number of intimate relationships we can have. I think that seems it seems that that dictated often the kind of the natural size of human groups before we reached industrial civilizations. So that’s interesting in the context of privacy, because it is difficult to and especially now that we’re connected with hundreds of thousands of people online, it’s it’s difficult for us sort of mentally to be able to handle that much information and dictate all the terms of those engagements on our own without technological assistance.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. But moving on to the ancient Greeks, so Aristotle provided a distinction between two spheres of life the public sphere, which he called polis, which was associated with the political sphere, and the oikos, which was a private sphere associated with life. So what does that tell us about the ancient Greeks understanding of privacy?

Yeah, I think that’s just a great, I mean, I think Oikos is thought of in different ways throughout the writings of different Greek philosophers, and it comes up both in sense of the physical structure and the idea of home and family.

Certainly there’s the same through line of respect for the family unit as the basic building block of society. I think Plato later was very much opposed to that. Plato, I think, considered that Oikos was a threat to the polis. It was a threat to the ability to have consistency in the social fabric. But yeah, I think just at a base level, it’s helpful to recognize that we’ve considered family life and the inside of our homes to be particularly separate spaces from the rest of society. And that context is takes different norms within that context than other parts of our lives.

And I think Socrates said that for where men conceal their ways from one another in darkness rather than light, there no man will ever rightly gain either his due, honor or office. Or the justice that is befitting. So how does that compare to what Aristotle said? And also, does this match up with popular Roman activities like they had public bathhouses and public latrines?

Yeah, I think it certainly suggests some consistency there between the thinking on transparency and some of those public norms.

I guess I would just highlight that there is so much that cultures are relative, that cultural relativism is a real thing. There’s nothing written in stone that says how we should as a culture dictate and enforce the norms of our lives, including around privacy, whether that’s around intimate behavior or nudity or whatever. A lot of we see with the Greeks and others that there’s different ways of slicing and dicing that. But what remains important is maintaining those norms and the context. And so lots of work is done to make sure that people respect whatever the norms are and keep to them in public or in private.

It’s interesting when you look at pictures of these public latrines, there’s no walls. Right. And I think nowadays people will be absolutely just horrified by know of going to the bathroom without a wall. Like, we have public bathrooms now, but they all have walls. But back then, there usually were no walls in these bathrooms, which I think is really interesting.

It’s interesting when you look at it and I think it kind of brings in the view of Europe versus United States as well. So I’m from Eastern Europe, and public nude beaches were very common there and still are. But here in the US, you don’t really see that, which I think is interesting.

I think, again, it just highlights the fact that all of that is relative.

Even if defecation is something that maybe isn’t something that people are as protective of for their privacy, there’s usually other things that doesn’t necessarily indicate that people are free in every aspect of their lives. I think those norms can shift and change over time. So I think even as the Greeks were fine with public nudity, more comfortable with relieving themselves in front of each other, I think they still had that deep respect for the separation of family and public life.

Yeah, it’s very so let’s move on to the Middle Ages. Great example in the Middle Ages and beyond. So royal wedding nights and royal births. They required public witnesses. What does that say to us about their view of privacy and privacy for individuals that live and work in the government versus private individuals?

Great example.

Right. Yeah, exactly. I think that’s a good example there of probably different expectations around the rights that private citizens have versus public officials. I think a big part of the idea behind things like that is to ensure sort of a paper trail when it comes to parentage and the importance of royal blood, those kinds of things.

Those are early indicators of what was to come later and how celebrities and public officials really have different expectations around their activities. And people have a sense that there’s a right to invade their privacy in many instances, because of the importance of their private activities to the public sphere.

We see some of that right now. So even though royal births are no longer really attended by the public,

We have kind of seen in the last couple of years that some people believe that because the royal family is partially funded by tax dollars, that there is some kind of right of private individuals to see the inside of those families lives. And that’s caused a lot of issues in the past.

And it’s interesting with women that are not royal. There had been different shifts in birth. Right. So right around the time when I was born, in the area that I was born, there was no kind of thought that the parent that’s not giving birth, that that parent should be in the same room as the parent that is giving birth. So, for example, my mom was by herself in the hospital, and my dad was outside of the hospital, and she showed me to him through the window versus now it’s very popular for both parents to be in the same room.

And I think that’s an interesting kind of opening to that kind of process.

Yeah, for sure. I think that’s just a good example of a very intimate part of our lives. Right. And so I think even if there’s that same relativism there

I don’t know. We always put special emphasis on certain moments, for sure, and yeah, I don’t know. It is interesting to see how that has shifted over time and. Also remains an important thing for people to feel like they need others to witness.

Yeah.

I think maybe it’s just the support, too, of having someone you love in the same room. Probably helps a lot, but now it’s kind of a choice. Some people have it, some people don’t. Some people take pictures, some people take videos, and others don’t. It’s really interesting to see how that’s evolved.

Mmhmm, for sure.

So, moving on to the late medieval and early renaissance period, so this is right around the time of the invention of the Gutenberg’s printing press. So the press really allowed people to contemplate their readings in private if they could read, instead of public places like the church. So how did the printing press change our view of privacy?

So moving on.

Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of those moments in history where we have major disruptive innovation missions. Both and I think the printing press is that for many reasons, including for privacy. That’s a great point to highlight around the ability of consuming information in private. I think it flattened the world in many ways. It allowed for the easier access to information and easier distribution of information, both of which have impacts to privacy, as you mentioned. I guess allowing people to consume information privately helps to changes the dynamic around how we expect our own thoughts and learnings to be respected, kind of setting the terms of our own autonomy there. And I think the ability to distribute information more easily, reducing the friction there, also helped to establish. It sort of laid the foundation for the norms that we see now around being able to share to dictate to both share widely, but also dictate to whom we’re sending information to.

It’s interesting because nowadays people will say, oh, kids, now they’re always in their phones. They’re not paying attention to where they’re walking. But I guess back when books were first started to be published, that’s what they would say about books, is that young people always have their heads in the book, not looking at what they’re doing and running into the road and all kinds of things.

So it looks like things haven’t changed that much since then.

Right, exactly.

So the US. Constitution, as it was originally written, it didn’t really talk that much about privacy. Right. We had the amendments come down later. That kind of third, fourth, and fifth amendments that talk about privacy. But what about the US. Constitution?

Initially.

That’s a good question. Yeah. We mostly focus on the fourth amendment as the primary vehicle for thinking about privacy in the US. Constitution.

There’s obviously, I think, part of what we part of putting limitations and guardrails around government’s ability to surveil and understand the intimate details of our lives was something that was certainly on the founders minds. And that’s, I guess, a good opportunity to highlight this idea of privacy. From whom? Right. And I think in the fourth amendment jurisprudence that we have, we’re always thinking about privacy from the government instead of privacy from private individuals or institutions. And that’s where a lot of our constitutional scholarship is focused. But data privacy is also concerned with dictating how other entities can view and infer data about us.

But I think a lot of early work, especially when governments were the primary stakeholders that had power over our lives, that was a much more important question.

And what about the first US. Census? So I think John Adams penned a note saying that he does not want to publish his information in the census. How was the first census kind of taken by individuals at that time?

Yeah, that’s a good question. I’d love to see a historical analysis just focused on that, because I do think that’s such a fascinating moment in time to have that distinction of, like, yeah, all of this at some point would be public. Our names and addresses and occupations all listed in a single registry.

I think that is certainly a transformative moment.

It’s interesting that from that time on, we’ve had a norm around sharing that information, at least in our local communities.

People probably remember phone books, or some people remember phone books now, and most of that same information was published and distributed for most people, people in the phone book. And this sense of our identities being out there for public consumption has been a part of our cult. Show fabric, but it was also at a time when there was a lot of friction involved between being able to consume and make use of that information required a lot of effort versus nowadays where we can combine and search much more easily.

Right. Imagine trying to dial everyone in the phone book to try to sell them something. I mean, it would take you years to do that versus now we have auto dialers and databases and all of this other stuff. So that’s why you’re getting these thousands of text messages every week about whatever it is that they want you to buy.

Um, so the 1710 post office act. So that established the US. Post office, and it banned sorting through mail and the opening of mail by postal employees. So how does this reflect the thoughts on privacy at the time?

Right, exactly.

Thank you.

I think this is a good representation of the fact that we have always privileged communications information. Right. That the ability to that communications information is sensitive data. It’s a sensitive aspect of our lives, and it should come with additional protections. One thing that is interesting in the Post Office Act and sort of the development of postal privacy is that the distinction between the contents of communications and the metadata, the delivery information on a postcard, not a postcard. Everything’s public on a postcard or viewable on a postcard, but the outside of the envelope versus the contents of the envelope. There’s a lot of analogies that happen later on in various court decisions and advocacy around extending that analogy into the digital sphere and saying that perhaps the government can surveil the metadata of our communications without a warrant, but certainly not the contents in certain circumstances.

It that’s a really interesting kind of juxtaposition between the inside and the outside of the envelope, right? Because back then, letters were probably included much more private information than they do now. Most of the letters that we get now are bills or advertisements or whatever, but back then, they didn’t have phone, they didn’t have email, so they wrote down their private things in the letter.

So I think that’s very interesting. And many say that the modern birth of privacy came with the publication of the right to privacy in the December 15, 1890, issue of the Harvard law review. Can you tell us a little bit more about that paper?

Sure. Yeah. Warren and Brande. Are sort of thought of as the forefathers of data privacy for sure in that paper. I think this is where we’re starting to see that transformation from a focus on physical privacy and physical autonomy to thinking about the kinds of artifacts that can be made about us.

Warren and Bradis were particularly concerned about the photograph, about the camera, and that was the transformative technology of the day.

Their writing on that is interesting primarily, and it’s relevant. It’s like continued relevance to our thinking about other new and emerging technologies. Emerging technologies always come with a whole new set of values and understandings. And we kind of struggle as a society always to shift our expectations around and often try to use analogies to say,

How should we be thinking about this technology and what kinds of privacy interests do we have?

Who has the right to consume information about us that this technology facilitates? So, yeah, it remains a perennially relevant paper and it’s always good to return to.

Absolutely. I think it’s interesting that they talked about limitations of privacy and consent being one of those limitations which we see in some European privacy laws where with the individual’s consent you can publish certain information or collect or use that information. So I think that’s interesting that we see that nowadays do.

This next one’s a kind of an interesting, fun tidbit of history. And that’s President Grover Cleveland’s wife. And at the know, his wife was apparently very beautiful. So her image was being used without her consent on advertisements, including for various beauty products, one of which included arsenic, which the advertisement said to use every day for clear skin or a beautiful complexion, which is definitely not something that you should do.

What does that tell us about privacy at the time?

There’s a lot to unpack in all of that because, yeah, this is sort of that continuation of the public figure privacy. Although the wives of American presidents have struggled, I think, throughout history with this sense of they didn’t necessarily choose.

It’s not like being born into royalty. It’s very different kind of public figure stardom. And I think some people have embraced that more than others.

I think the issues around the use of people’s images.

Certainly that’s part of what underlies some of the traditional privacy torts in the United States and elsewhere, kind of invasion of people’s autonomy, the use of people’s, spreading people’s likeness without their permission. And there’s also advertising law components of the fact pattern that you just described, I think. I mean, Frances Cleveland was also she tried very hard, I think, to preserve her privacy throughout her life, including by deciding to live away from the White House, similar to President Trump’s wife, I think, in that decision, and trying to avoid the public light because there was so much pressure to become this public figure without privacy. Maintaining that kind of autonomy and dignity was important to certain people.

Absolutely. I totally agree with that. I don’t think any of us would be happy if our image were to be used to sell arsenic, beauty cream that could potentially poison and kill people and all of this kind of stuff.

I mean, at the time, we didn’t necessarily know that part, but, yes,

In hindsight, it’s probably bad to have been part of spreading arsenic on your face. Yeah.

Yeah.

So with the invention of the telephone, at the very beginning of the telephone, private telephone lines were very expensive. So neighbors shared one line and they called it a party line. And apparently it was common to eavesdrop on others calls. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

So, yeah, I mean, this is another transformative technology, right. And so it’s always interesting how the limitations of technologies like the structures and design decisions in how we build a product dictate the kinds of privacy expectations that people have at the time. Yeah, it was expensive to build direct lines. It required a single each line was a line of copper, and it was both expensive and relatively infeasible to connect every single home until they found better ways of distributing those analog signals.

And, yeah, that means that from that our expectation of how conversations, the privacy of conversations had to fit that technology.

I think people would were too excited about the fact that they could call each other the way that that connect. To people with much less friction than going to trying to go see someone in a planned way. Corresponding over the mail was such a transformative thing that we accepted with that adjustments to our expectations. Although also in person communication is generally subject to eavesdropping as well. So I think it wasn’t one that much I don’t think it was that much of an issue for people to think like, oh, other people will be able to hear this. Just like if I’m talking to someone in church, they’ll be able to hear my conversation. So if I really want to be private, I guess I’ll write it and send it through the postal service.

There’s some really interesting posters that were made at that time to keep party lines private and not eavesdrop on your neighbor’s conversations, and I wonder how well those worked. But, yeah/

That’s a really nice

yeah, I mean, I think that’s cool, too, in terms of like yeah, you start to see different ways of policing or establishing social norms and adjusting those over time. But that requires unless there’s technological solutions, like going to individual lines, that requires sort of goodwill and people following the unwritten or written rules around what privacy should look like.

It is yeah, the honor system. Kind of like I’m talking to someone and I’m hoping that my neighbors aren’t listening. But speaking about policing, let’s talk about our final topic, which is the famous novel by George Orwell, 1984. So how did this novel describe the potential infringements of privacy in the future and what did it tell us about privacy at the time?

Exactly.

It’s. Well, yeah, I mean, again, this, I think pushes us back again towards this conversation around privacy. From whom?

The premise of 1984, I’m assuming most people are familiar with, but it’s a dystopian novel about a society that really lacks privacy, especially from the government.

It’s a time that when people are expected to share with the government all aspects of their lives and their neighbors lives, and that conformity is valued over anything else. And I think what’s interesting, I think, for tech policy nerds, or at least for me and that story, are the technologies that Orwell was considering as especially things that didn’t quite exist at the time. So televisions that could that could spy on you, the kinds of ubiquitous surveillance devices that he. Envisions and now are more or less commonplace, but not in the same quite the same way that he was envisioning. Not the television that had a dedicated agent on the other line making sure that you were not up to any nefarious activities in the privacy of your home. But we do have more ubiquitous devices around us now with lots of sensors and cameras, microphones, and trying to determine those guardrails to make sure that we’re not facilitating the kind of world seen in 1984 is a big part of what privacy professionals do.

I think the telescreen is really interesting in 1984, because in the novel the telescreen, the person watching on the other end of it is a party official, right? So a representative of the government versus now, a lot of the technologies that we have, the people that are on the other end, not necessarily watching exactly what you’re doing, but collecting that data, are companies.

Right? So we kind of went from being concerned about the government watching us to being concerned about the government and private companies watching us. And I think one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is newspeak. Do you think that has any kind of closeness to what we call fake news now?

Well, first yeah, on your prior point, let me just say that I think yeah, it’s not just privacy from commercial entities, but also there’s a lot of important guardrails related to how a company is going to use information. Right. So there was the FTC case against Vizio. It was a TV that was watching you not you, but watching what you’re watching.

And now that’s actually commonplace for companies at all layers of the TV chain to be paying attention to what it is, the stuff that you’re consuming, but maybe not reporting that to the government and maybe not using it in an identifiable ways, using it instead in more aggregated forms.

But those kinds of guardrails are important. And that’s kind of the bread and butter of what we do. Newspeak. Yeah. And fake news. I would see a newspeak more a reflection of, again, how society evolves. Right. I think newspeak was an idea of a government mandated changes in language use to help. And I think part of Orwell’s idea there was that changing how we talk, changes how we think. That by trying to banish certain. Phrases or change the meaning of things. You could adjust people’s patterns of thought and behavior.

I think there’s certain reflections of that in how we organically evolve as a society. And I think that evolution has been facilitated and intensified by our always connected nature now. So I think social media and algorithmic content decisions certainly help to facilitate the evolution of language, the evolution of expectations around how we interact with each other, and that trickles down in various ways into our society.

And also, I think what we see now are lots of the kinds of filter bubbles. So maybe not newspeak for everyone, but newspeak for certain populations. More of a fracturing?

Yeah. Very cool. So thank you so much for sharing your insights into the history of privacy. In our next episode, we’ll be discussing the history of privacy from the novel 1984 to the more modern pre Internet era. But without further ado, I did want to get into our privacy news segment real quick.

So the latest news in privacy, which is AI privacy concerns that’s been very popular lately. So there have been multiple regulators, like those in Germany and Italy that have launched investigations as to whether Chat GPT violates privacy. Some of those concerns have been resolved, but many are still unsure as to whether large language models like chat GPT or Bard to violate privacy.

And a lot of people are still very cautious using those types of tools. So what types of privacy issues can be caused by AI tools? And how can people protect themselves?

Yeah, that’s a big question and certainly top of mind for a lot of people right now. The IAPP just announced the launch of our AI governance center, which is endeavoring to do all the same things that we do for the privacy profession, but for the broader AI governance community, which includes a lot of additional equities not related to privacy.

Things like bias and discrimination, things like intellectual property rights, lots of issues raised by AI generative. AI has been, like you said, top of mind recently, definitely an explosion in terms of the policy discourse and the discourse everywhere right now.

I view the privacy interests involved in generative AI as actually less salient than other types of uses of AI, but they certainly are there. And often when we’re thinking about powerful algorithms, we are thinking about privacy issues related to the data that are used to train those.

Algorithms and then also data that can be produced using them. So there are certainly privacy issues involved in how in the data that’s ingested. And that’s an area where the FTC has issued warnings and some shots across the bow already saying you have to have data is only as good as the provenance of an the privacy interests that you have to begin with. And so if you’re using data that you don’t have a right to be using to train these algorithms, the FTC is not going to look kindly on that. And there’s privacy interests on the back end as well, although those are a little bit more fraught. I think misinformation or perceived misinformation in the output of generative AI can have a privacy framing in the sense that anything about us, even if it’s false, we may have a privacy interest in.

But these systems, generative AI systems, are designed to be creative. They’re not designed for accuracy. And so I think there’s a lot of misconception around how around the point of such systems. And at the same time, I think there’s a lot of other types of uses of AI that do have more direct impacts on our daily lives and our privacy interests.

Things like in the employment context, in housing, in the policing context, there’s a lot of areas where privacy and other equities are coming up a lot. So I would highly recommend the report from the electronic privacy information center that really unpacks a lot of the issues around AI privacy that really dives deep into the issues and then moving forward.

We’re hoping to really help privacy professionals train up and be able to join these conversations on generative AI and other types of AI within organizations, because we’re finding that privacy people have this on their desk no matter what. Anyway. And we need to better understand these additional issues that are being raised. So we’re planning a conference in November, and we’re off to the races on all of the AI issues and how they intersect with privacy.

Very cool. I do hope that some lawyers join that conference. There’s recently been some attorney that got into trouble for using AI to write a brief, and it cited cases that don’t exist. So he did get into a lot of trouble for so well, thank you, Cobun, so much for taking the time to talk to me.

Very cool.

Really appreciate it. Really appreciate all the resources and knowledge that you share on an hourly basis with all privacy professionals.

Of course. Thank you so much, Donata. I’m excited to hear the rest of your podcasts, and I look forward to chatting anytime. I really appreciate you having me on.

Awesome. Thank you. Bye.