The Privacy Advisor Podcast: Product design as an exercise of power and manipulation

Our modern privacy frameworks, with their emphasis on gaining informed consent from consumers in order to use their data, are broken models. That's according to Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Northeastern University in Boston. In this episode of The Privacy Advisor Podcast, Hartzog discusses the ways that, given such models, technologies are designed at the engineering level to undermine user privacy. Hartzog's research focuses on “the complex problems that arise when personal information is collected by powerful new technologies, stored and disclosed online.” Social media companies, for example, which make money on user data via advertisers, “have every incentive to use the power they have with designers to engineer your almost near-constant disclosure of information. We will be worn down by design; our consent is preordained,” he says.