Rethinking Privacy after this Pandemic

Symposium Rethinking Privacy after this Pandemic, September 15 & 16 2022 at the University of Bonn and online

The ways societies handled the COVID-19 pandemic from early 2020 on has shed light onto a topic that concerns us all: privacy. Having to use online meeting, learning and teaching software to be able to take part in social, school and work life, gave the providers of these services and products an even greater market power alongside with increased spying and surveillance opportunities into peoples’ daily lives. Opting-out of using these tools became impossible. Using smartphones that are ubiquitous listening devices anyhow for governmental Corona tracing did raise many data protection concerns, leading in several countries to trying to build “privacy by design”- applications and take ethical issues into consideration. Being forced to stay at home, not having a dedicated space for work, as “room of one’s own”, nor for leisure, not being able to choose freely with whom to spend one’s free time, (intellectual) property rights of vaccines, rise of domestic violence, non-access to medical care and contraception for women etc. have put into focus questions of the privacy debate many people conceived of as discussed – or even solved – decades ago.

At this conference we will undertake an interdisciplinary reconsideration of privacy, asking how we do want our society to look like based on what we saw, experienced and hopefully learned from the current present and recent past.