Insights on Privacy - Christena Nippert-Eng and Alessandro Acquisti

On February 28, 2011, our Office held its second Insights on Privacy armchair discussion with Alessandro Acquisti and Christena Nippert-Eng. They talked about what motivates us to reveal or conceal details of our personal lives, and how we protect the private lives of others around us.

Alessandro Acquisti is an Associate Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. He is the co-director of the CMU Center for Behavioral Decision Research (CBDR), a member of Carnegie Mellon Cylab, and a fellow of the Ponemon Institute. His work investigates the economic and social impact of information technology, and in particular the economics and behavioural economics of privacy and information security, as well as privacy in online social networks. He is co-editor the book Digital Privacy: Theory, Technologies, and Practices (2007), an analysis of state-of-the-art technologies, best practices, and research results, as well as legal, regulatory, and ethical issues.

Christena Nippert-Eng is Associate Professor of Sociology in the College of Science and Letters at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her most recent book, Islands of Privacy: Selective Concealment and Disclosure in Everyday Life (2010) is an exploration of the ways we think about privacy on a daily basis -- how we try to achieve it for ourselves and enable it for others. In addition to her work as the National Chair of the Communication and Information Technologies Section of the American Sociological Association (2010-2011), Dr. Nippert-Eng conducts industrial research on people's behaviour and relationships with objects and spaces, including information and communication technologies. She is currently at work on a second book on privacy and socialization.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada Licence.

DISCLAIMER: The views or opinions expressed by the guest speakers are solely their own and do not represent the views or opinions of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

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News & Politics

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• privacy
• socialization
• Acquisti
• Nippert-Eng