This project is about the discourses of privacy and privacy law. It constructs the landscape of privacy discourse, where it has been, where it is going, and who it empowers along the way. Based on primary sources research, the project argues that the changing discourse around privacy is shifting power over our data from the field of law to terrain of technology, thereby weakening substantive privacy protections for individuals.

Recommendation systems are ubiquitous and impact many domains; they have the potential to influence product consumption, individuals’ perceptions of the world, and life-altering decisions. These systems are often evaluated or trained with data from users already exposed to algorithmic recommendations; this creates a pernicious feedback loop. We demonstrate how using data confounded in this way homogenizes user behavior without increasing utility.