Insights on Privacy - Adam Greenfield and Aza Raskin

On April 20th, 2011, our Office held the third Insights on Privacy armchair discussion. We heard in February about what motivates us to reveal or conceal details of our personal lives, and how we protect the private lives of others around us.

To complement this talk, we invited tech innovators Adam Greenfield (@agpublic) and Aza Raskin (@azaaza) to explore opportunities for privacy in the design of intimate devices, like smart phones, that we share our lives with every day, to the sensor-rich landscape that's upon us. We discussed opportunities for companies to empower individuals with greater choice and control over how their data are used and for greater collaboration within and across industry sectors.

In his 2006 book Everyware, Adam Greenfield argued that we were headed for a world in which keeping the boundaries between different roles in our lives was going to prove untenable. That notion is coming to pass with the current debate over the public/private divide and the blurring of our various roles and reputations online. Adam was Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services from 2008 to 2010 and Lead Information Architect at Razorfish Tokyo. His current projects through Urbanscale focus on improving how users experience technology, such as stored-value cards for public transit and many other "smart-city" initiatives.

Aza Raskin's passion for improving the way we experience technology recently had him heading up user experience for Mozilla, developer of the popular Firefox browser, where he rethought and simplified conventional approaches to privacy policies. Raskin left Mozilla in late 2010 to launch the start-up Massive Health, with the goal of helping people improve control of their health through innovatively designed technology and the ways we interact with it.

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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