Brenda McPhail, Ph.D. – currently on leave from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association
Brenda is “Acting Executive Director of the Master Program in Public Policy in Digital Society”

Topic: “Nothing to Hide? Privacy protects more than just secrets in the big-data world”

You’ve probably heard the expression, “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.” But today, we live in a society that increasingly relies on data about you—whether or not you know it’s being created—to make decisions about what you see, what you might want to buy, and even who you might want to vote for. That means that when we talk about privacy, we have to move past thinking about things we want to keep secret about ourselves, and focus on the fundamental human rights at stake when we lose control of information about ourselves.