Privacy Through the Lenses of Race and Gender

There is increasing interest in understanding the different impact race and gender have on the enjoyment of privacy and data protection rights. On International Women’s Day, Anita L. Allen will discuss privacy through the lenses of race and gender, values and rights. Although privacy should be considered a foundational good and can represent social power – as well as a tool to resist power – the story of privacy for groups on the margins has been a lack of privacy protection, or too much of the wrong kinds of privacy.

Privacy is a crucial tool in the freedom-lover's kit for a successful life and an indispensable shield to protect the most vulnerable from excessive control and oversight. Nations should be committed to protecting privacy for all people, whether they eagerly embrace privacy or not. But we need to ask: Who is watched and who is to be observed? Who is profiled and who is ignored? Who gets to be invisible or is forced into invisibility? What are the implications of our demands for justice? Are we all equal in relation to privacy, and does the state care equally for everybody’s privacy?

PROGRAMME
20:00 – Welcome and introduction by Gily Coene
20:10 – Anita Allen: Privacy Through the Lenses of Race and Gender
20:40 – Q&A with Gloria González Fuster and Sabrine Ingabire
21:00 – Questions from the Zoom audience

• Anita L. Allen is an internationally recognized specialist on privacy law and ethics. She is Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019 she was awarded an honorary doctoral degree for contributions to privacy law and technology policy studies by Tilburg University.

• Gily Coene is professor at the Ethics and Philosophy department and the department of Political Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She is also director of the VUB-Research Centre on Gender and Diversity and member of the research Centre on Ethics and Humanism. Coene is a founding member of an interuniversity master in gender and diversity.

• Gloria González Fuster is a Research Professor at VUB’s Faculty of Law and Criminology. Co-Director of the Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) Research Group, and member of the Brussels Privacy Hub (BPH). She investigates legal issues related to privacy, personal data protection and security.

• Rwanda-born Sabrine Ingabire grew up between Brussels and Flanders and lives in Amsterdam. She is a national news editor at NRC and an intersectional feminist writer. In 2016 her first novel Le chemin vers le bonheur was published. She contributed to the anthologies Black (2018), Le Ravage d'Ali Baba (2019), De verovering van Jupiter (2020) and Being (Imposed Upon) (2020). She was also co-curator of Being (Imposed Upon).