The Civic Dialogues Program will host Prof. Ganesh Sitaraman, New York Alumni Chancellor’s Chair in Law at Vanderbilt University, and Dr. Michael Zimmer, associate professor of computer science in the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, for a discussion on big tech on Friday, Sept. 30, at 12:30 p.m. in AMU 227.
A light lunch will be served. Students are asked to register online by Friday, Sept. 23 at noon.
Debates about the power of big tech have grown in recent years. Has the rise of big tech undermined economic competitiveness and democracy? Should we reform how we regulate tech platforms? Does content moderation threaten free speech? What should we do to protect privacy on the internet? Is there a national security case for breaking up big tech?
Sitaraman is the author of several books, including “The Great Democracy: How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America” (2019), “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic” (2017), and “The Counterinsurgent’s Constitution: Law in the Age of Small Wars” (2012).
A public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, Sitaraman has also been a longtime advisor to Elizabeth Warren. He has been profiled in The New York Times and Politico for his work at the nexus of politics and ideas.
Zimmer is a privacy and data ethics scholar whose work focuses on digital privacy and surveillance, the ethics of big data, internet research ethics and the broader social and ethical dimensions of emerging digital technologies.
Zimmer is the director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society at Marquette. He is an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, as well as the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute.