In the shadow of hacking scandals like Snapchat’s massive photo leak and a world still processing the news that came from Edward Snowden’s NSA data dump, the question “Is privacy dead” desperately needs an answer.
A group of privacy and cybersecurity experts tackled the topic Monday at the Forbes Under 30 Summit. They reasoned that privacy isn’t dead, but needs better protection and the younger generation to spearhead change.
“We are in this flux right now trying to determine what is the balance between safety and privacy,” said Adam Ghetti, cofounder of Ionic Security and one of the speakers.
Ghetti was joined by Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament for the Pirate Party, and Amie Stepanovich, senior policy counsel for Accessnow and moderator Bruce Upbin, managing editor of Forbes. The group of speakers concurred that finding the middle ground between protecting people with surveillance while respecting people’s privacy is a complicated task and involves working with technology and politics.
Technology is a driving force in the debate on privacy. As new tools are made to ease connectivity, conflicts over how the programs are used pop up.
“There’s not a whole lot of energies being put into truly secure telecommunication and information sharing technology,” Ghetti said. “There’s a lot of energies being put into solutions that seem good enough, act good enough.”
Stepanovich argued that changing the public perception of privacy was also key. She asked the room who has heard the the phrase “I have nothing to hide so I don’t care” when it comes to privacy and the internet. She then asked who believed that and found that not many in the crowd agreed with that statement.
“There are a lot of issues when you think about privacy from the ‘I don’t have anything to hide’ perspective,” Stepanovich said. “The big one is how much of privacy is a societal concern. When you take privacy away you take away a tremendous value to society as a whole.”
The group of speakers agreed that privacy is very much alive and encouraged the new wave of entrepreneurs, inventors and politicians to find a way to protect that.
“We have to reinvent our democracies and reinvent our systems and that is the challenge you guys have,” Jonsdottir said. “And that is incredibly, I really envy you.”
