Suvina Singal, Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, is visiting the LSTS during this semester.
On 23 November 2023, 12:30 to 13:30 CET, Suvina will present her PhD research project, entitled ‘Making the Value of Privacy’.
Abstract: Using archival sources and interviews, my PhD research aims to understand how the meaning and value of data privacy/protection are decided in the context of an increasingly digitalized world and changing political economy. To do this, I study five privacy regulations in the European Union and the United States of America that have been used to impose fines on tech companies for privacy violations. These laws include the GDPR in the EU, and the Section 5 of the FTC Act, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the US. These laws encompass a variety of data categories, enforcement channels, and penalty structures, thereby offering a rich set of case studies to understand how the value of privacy is created. In this project, I ask three questions: 1) How do different regulations decide on data categories, their worth, and how and when they should be protected? 2) What techniques do different regulations apply in calculating the monetary value of a fine and why? 3) How are these fines perceived by tech companies and what impact do they have on how companies work with user data?
This event will be in a hybrid format (both on-campus and online). Interested participants wishing to take part can register by sending an email to Pablo.Rodrigo.Trigo.Kramcsak@vub.be.