Free About 1 hr0 learners Rev. 2026-10-28 0

Four places you visited, with the times you were there, are usually enough to pick you out of a crowd of a million and a half. Your phone shares far more than four. Meanwhile the old images of surveillance, a guard in a tower or a secret policeman with a notebook, have given way to something quieter: auctions for your attention that run before a web page loads, cameras that can put a name to a face, and court cases arguing over whether a week of location records is a search. Privacy is no longer only about closing the curtains.

You will follow the question from two Boston lawyers worried about portable cameras in 1890, through Bentham's all seeing prison, the files of the Stasi and the FBI's campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., to bulk phone records, data brokers and Europe's GDPR. The case for watching gets a fair hearing alongside the case for limits. Afterward you should be able to tell metadata from content, spot when information has slipped out of the context it was shared in, read a surveillance proposal with sharper questions, and make choices about your own devices that match the risks you actually face.

Levels

  1. 1 1. Why Privacy Matters 5-question quiz
  2. 2 2. The Watching Eye 5-question quiz
  3. 3 3. The Files: Secret Police and Spying on Dissent 5-question quiz
  4. 4 4. Bulk Collection After 9/11 5-question quiz
  5. 5 5. Data Brokers and the Advertising Economy 5-question quiz
  6. 6 6. Faces and Places 5-question quiz
  7. 7 7. Privacy and the Law 5-question quiz
  8. 8 8. Security, Liberty and Everyday Choices 5-question quiz

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