“Ticking Boxes and Telling Stories: Privacy, Data Sharing, and the Construction of Identity”

Dr. Benjamin J Goold
Associate Dean, Academic Affairs,
Director, Centre for Asian Legal Studies
University of British Columbia

Over the last twenty years, we have all become subjects of increasingly pervasive and intense surveillance. Every time we go online, our activities are monitored and our personal information is collected, stored, and potentially shared. Our mobile phones track our movements, surveillance cameras watch us as we pass through public and semi-private spaces, and increasingly government agencies and private organizations asks us to provide more and more information about ourselves. How has this intensification of surveillance changed the way we think about identity? How do we reconcile the stories we tell about ourselves – our personal narratives – with the digital, categorical identities that have become an inescapable aspect of modern life? What happens when our narrative identity and our categorical identities collide or contradict each other? This lecture seeks to explore these issues through the lens of privacy, and suggests that we need to reconsider many of our ideas of identity and private space in order to make sense of a world in which identity is increasingly determined by the routine surveillance activities that now dominate our everyday lives.