Book Talk – The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age

September 20, 2022 @ 6:00pm ET
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Please join us for a Book Talk with Danielle Keats Citron as she talks about her new book THE FIGHT FOR PRIVACY: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age.

September 20 at 6:00pm – 7:30pm ET.
Lobby-level Lounge at FPF Offices: 1350 I St. NW Washington DC 20005

Light refreshments and drinks provided.

In her book , Danielle Keats Citron discusses how the 2022 midterm elections will likely feature the sort of invasion and weaponization of personal privacy that has become a favorite tool to undermine political opponents and derail successful campaigns. Deep fakes, leaked emails and phone records, hacked computers, and character assassination in the form of journalistic scoop can be readily deployed and can cause lasting damage to people’s families, private lives, reputations, and careers. In THE FIGHT FOR PRIVACY: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age [W. W. Norton & Company] legal expert and scholar Danielle Citron sounds the alarm about the failures of our legal system to protect personal privacy, tells the stories of the high-profile cases she’s worked on, and explains what will happen if Congress fails to pass laws that address our vulnerability. As she notes, “when the state exploits your intimate communications and relationships, it legitimizes the view that intimate life can be violated with impunity.”

Expanding the scope of her argument beyond the political realm, Citron takes the conversation about technology and privacy out of the boardrooms and op-ed columns to reach readers where we are—in bathrooms and bedrooms, with our families and our lovers, in the parts of our lives we assume are untouchable—and shows us that privacy, as we think we know it, is largely already gone. From nonconsensual pornography to online extortion, to the sale of our data for profit, we are vulnerable to abuse. As Citron reveals, wherever we live, laws have failed miserably to keep up with corporate or individual violators, letting our privacy wash out with the technological tide. With vivid examples drawn from interviews with victims, activists, and lawmakers from around the world, THE FIGHT FOR PRIVACY argues urgently and forcefully for a reassessment of privacy as a human right and provides a road map for understanding and defending privacy in the twenty-first century.

Agenda

Time

Event

Location

6:00 pm ET

Welcome and Introduction

Lobby-level Lounge at FPF Offices

7:00 pm ET

Book Discussion & Audience Q&A

Lobby-level Lounge at FPF Offices

Speakers

Danielle Keats Citron

Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law & Caddell and Chapman Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

Danielle Citron is the Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law and Caddell and Chapman Professor of Law at UVA, where she writes and teaches about privacy, free expression and civil rights. Her scholarship and advocacy have been recognized nationally and internationally. In 2019, Citron was named a MacArthur Fellow based on her work on cyberstalking and intimate privacy. In 2018, she received the UMD Champion of Excellence award and in 2015, the United Kingdom’s Prospect Magazine named her one of the Top 50 World Thinkers and The Daily Record named her one of the Top 50 Most Influential Marylanders. She serves as the inaugural director of the school’s LawTech Center, which focuses on pressing questions in law and technology.

Her latest book, “The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age” (W.W. Norton and Penguin Vintage UK), will be out in October 2022. Her first book, “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace” (Harvard University Press, 2014), was widely praised in published reviews, discussed in blog posts and named one of the 20 Best Moments for Women in 2014 by the editors of Cosmopolitan magazine. She has published more than 50 articles and essays, including in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review, California Law Review, Boston University Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Southern California Law Review, Texas Law Review, and many more, which have won professional awards from the International Association of Privacy Professionals and privacy think tank Future of Privacy Forum, and been cited by state and federal courts. She has written more than 50 opinion pieces for major media outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Time, CNN and Slate.

For the past decade, Citron has worked with lawmakers, law enforcement and tech companies to combat online abuse and to protect intimate privacy. In June 2019, she testified before Congress about the national security and privacy risks of deepfakes. She has been involved in reform efforts around the regulation of online platforms. In October 2019, she testified before Congress about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. From 2014 to 2016, Citron served as an advisor to then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris and as a member of Harris’ Task Force to Combat Cyber Exploitation and Violence Against Women. In 2011, Citron testified about misogynistic cyber hate speech before the Inter-Parliamentary Committee on Anti-Semitism at the House of Commons in the United Kingdom. Since 2011, she has been a member of Facebook’s Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery Task Force and an adviser and a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Task Force and as an adviser to the company since 2009. She is an adviser to the dating app Bumble, the music streaming service Spotify, and video sharing platform TikTok.

Citron is the vice president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit devoted to fighting for civil rights and liberties in the digital age founded in 2013 and named after her article “Cyber Civil Rights.” She is the chair of the board of directors of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and serves on the board of directors of the Future of Privacy Forum, as well as on the Advisory Board of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Technology and Society and the Center on Investigative Journalism. In 2020, she received a $75,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to study the salutary impact of intimate privacy laws on victims, a project that she is co-leading with Canadian academic Jon Penney.

Citron is an affiliate scholar at the Stanford Center on Internet and Society, Yale Information Society Project, and NYU’s Policing Project. As a member of the American Law Institute, she serves as an adviser to the Restatement Third, Information Privacy Principles Project and Restatement (Third) Torts: Defamation and Privacy.

Citron has appeared on film and television (HBO’s “Vice News,” HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” Hulu’s “The Weekly,” “Netizens,” and HBO’s “Swiped”); quoted in hundreds of news articles, interviewed on National Public Radio; appeared on podcasts for The New York Times, Slate, Lawfare, The Guardian and The Boston Globe; and given a TED talk, “How Deepfakes Undermine Truth and Democracy,” at the 2019 TED Global Summit. Her TED talk has been viewed more than 3.4 million times. She has given more than 300 talks at major universities, federal and state agencies, the National Holocaust Museum, the Wikimedia Foundation, the National Association of Attorneys General, and think tanks.

Before joining UVA Law, Citron taught at Boston University School of Law and the University of Maryland School of Law. She has been a visiting professor at Fordham Law School and George Washington Law School. In 2016, she was a Dean’s Distinguished Visitor at Washington University School of Law and an interdisciplinary studies fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.