Digital Trust & Security Seminar Series: Kieron O'Hara 

This seminar features our guest speaker, Kieron O'Hara, Emeritus Fellow in Electronics and Computer Science, the University of Southampton.
Talk Title: 'The Seven Veils of Privacy'
Summary:
Privacy is one of the most contested concepts of our time. In his recent book, The Seven Veils of Privacy, Kieron O’Hara sets out a rigorous and comprehensive framework for understanding debates about privacy and our rights to it. Much of the conflict around privacy comes from a failure to recognise divergent perspectives. Some people argue about human rights, some about social conventions, others about individual preferences and still others about information and data processing. As a result, 'privacy' has become the focus of competing definitions, leading some to denounce the 'disarray' in the field.
But disagreements about the role and value of privacy obscure a large amount of agreement on the topic. Privacy is not a technical term of law, cybersecurity or sociology, but a word in common use that adequately expresses a few simple and related ideas. Once we learn to distinguish the different discourses involving the term, the apparent disarray dissolves, and the parochial nature of our disagreements revealed.