How privacy can save your life | Carissa Véliz | TEDxPorto

Privacy is important because it protects us from possible abuses of power. That makes it essential for both personal freedom and democracy. Without privacy, fundamental pillars of democracy like investigative journalism, attorney-client privilege, and fair elections fail. In this talk, Carissa Véliz shows that, given how we have designed the digital, to digitize is to surveil.

Technology is not neutral, and neither is digitization. The very act of turning what was not data into data is a form of surveillance. To digitize is to make taggable, searchable, and trackable that which was previously off the record. And what is it to track if not to surveil? Surveillance leads to control, and societies of control end up undermining freedom. How we are building AI, with troves of personal data, and with the capacity to sift through data always on, is an ethical choice.

Ubiquitous personalized AI chatbots are further eroding our privacy and threatening with ever more efficient mass surveillance. But these design features are ethical choices, and ethical choices should be based on reflections on what it is to have a good life. What data we share with AI is an exercise in applied ethics that is relevant to policymakers, businesses, and citizens alike. Ethics, far from being a barrier to innovation, is a catalyst of innovation. How can we redesign the digital with ethics in mind? What would the digital look like if it wasn’t designed for surveillance?

Carissa Véliz is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI, and a Fellow at Hertford College at the University of Oxford. She is the recipient of the 2021 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She is the author of the highly-acclaimed Privacy Is Power (an Economist book of the year, 2020) and the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She is a member of UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI. She advises companies and policymakers around the world on privacy and the ethics of AI. She thinks books are the greatest artefact of them all. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx