Luohan On Air: Recent Episodes
Luohan Academy
Luohan On-Air is brought to you by the Luohan Academy – an open research institute based in Hangzhou, China. This podcast features conversations with thought leaders from all around the globe about the most pressing issues in these digital times. Backed by Alibaba Group, the Academy is dedicated to explore and advance the tremendous social and economic transformations brought by digitalization.
In this episode, professors Itay Fainmesser and Ruslan Momot discuss how government, companies, and academia, must work together to tackle problems around data collection and consumer privacy. They explain the current confusion over what and how to regulate as technology continues to develop. They stress the need for businesses to factor in privacy protection into their business models and discuss how some companies are approaching it. And finally, they talk about why the stakes could be rising as consumers look forward to more and more price discrimination based on the data companies now collect on them.
In this episode of Luohan On Air, industrial ecologist and ecological economist Julia Steinberger discusses the outsized impact the world’s wealthy have on the environment, why SUVs should be regulated out of existence, and why it’s time for economies to stop growing. Steinberger is a lead author of an upcoming United Nations IPCC climate change report.
China took another step toward data privacy protection, passing national-level Personal Information Protection legislation. Along with other data rules taking effect this fall, companies will be required to make sure their data storage and processing practices are in order. It could curtail practices around personalized recommendations and what kinds of data can be moved across borders. In this episode, Stanford internet policy expert and attorney James Dempsey discusses why national-level privacy legislation in the United States is still elusive and lays out why the bad guys are winning in the fight against cybercrime. He also discusses what can be done when artificial intelligence makes it harder to provide equal access to opportunities.
In this episode, Carnegie Mellon professor and technologist Alessandro Acquisti discusses the futility of making individuals responsible for protecting their own data and the myth of personal control. He raises skepticism over whether laws like GDPR are actually producing better corporate behavior. He is optimistic about the benefits of privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETs. Acquisti also addresses the ethics around biometric technology, if big data companies should be broken up, and what it might take to get companies to behave better.
On April 26, the iPhone maker, Apple, released changes on its operating system that allows users to choose whether their apps can track them online. A pop-up screen asks users whether to “Ask App Not to Track” or to “Allow”. Most users were expected to say No. Already, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency push has sent reverberations throughout the $350 billion a year digital ad industry. Prior to these developments, the Luohan Academy’s Executive Director Long Chen and Columbia Business School Professor Patrick Bolton sat down to discuss what it means to think of data as a public good and the implications of putting the individual in charge of giving consent. Professor Bolton suggests consent-based privacy protections are based on the wrong principles. He also explains why liability rules and fiduciary duties could protect privacy better than using a property or ownership-based framework.