Nothing To Hide, Everything To Fear: Privacy In The Digital Age

Our speaker this month is Kevin Welch. Kevin is the president of EFF-Austin, a digital civil liberties organization that was founded alongside Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and which continues to be a member of their Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA). At EFF-Austin, he leads their push to educate the public and politicians about important legal and cultural issues confronting society in emerging technological spaces, and has spoken at diverse venues on these topics including at SXSW and to State Department international delegations. He is a Caltech graduate with degrees in Bioengineering and English. The focus of his studies involved implementing chemical computers via DNA logic gates and circuits and a senior thesis on Tech Noir films. His professional career has consisted of a number of software-related positions ranging from programming the math in slot machine games for the company Everi to full-stack web programming of advanced word-processing/legal software for the Texas Legislative Council. Currently, he is employed as a software engineer for Civitech, an Austin-based startup working to provide software and big-data solutions for small-and-mid-sized progressive political campaigns. He is an Austin native, an activist, a hacker, a cyberpunk, a writer of science fiction, mythology, and poetry, an analog synthesizer enthusiast, as well as an indie video game developer. He believes the future doesn’t have to suck, and can even be fun.

Most of us are aware on some level that we are constantly being spied on online, with our every action, our every click, our every conversation and preference being added to some ever-growing dossier on us in a corporate or government computer. Corporations often defend their actions and downplay the privacy risks by saying that they only collect the data to provide us with better services, that this surveillance is the price that we pay for these free services, and that most of the data collected is anonymized before it is sold, so nothing is being personally tied to anyone. In this talk, Kevin Welch will take a look at some of these claims and show that even seemingly harmless, benign data collection practices can lead to serious risks both for the freedom of the individual and the freedom of society at large.

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Join us for the discussion from 7:00PM-9:00PM, followed by drinks and camaraderie from 9:00PM-10:00PM at Firehouse Lounge (605 Brazos St).

Capital Factory is located at 701 Brazos Street, on the 16th floor of the Omni Hotel. Once on the 16th floor, there should be a sign at the front desk directing you to our meetup. If there is no sign, and no one is on duty at the desk, we are usually in the room to the left of the front desk.

Talk will be livestreamed at https://www.youtube.com/user/austintechlive

Parking for the Omni Garage can be validated at the Capital Factory front desk, reducing the cost from $18 to $7. Details: https://capitalfactory.com/parking/

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