Tech Science Seminars: Power to the People: The Real Rulers of Silicon Valley

Let’s face it – consumers say they care about privacy but they rarely do anything about it. So why do companies like Microsoft and Apple engage in high-profile and costly legal battles against government data access? Why did Palantir build a dozen-strong team of privacy engineers to design privacy-protective capabilities for an intelligence community that shortly after 9/11 was hardly clamoring for them? The answer is that the beating heart (and the seat of power) of Silicon Valley is not a cadre of super-rich investors but in fact an army of highly-skilled, highly-valued engineers without whom the engine of today’s information economy does not run. In this talk, I propose a “two marketplace” theory to explain Silicon Valley’s focus on privacy and what this means for how proponents of better privacy and civil liberties protections should direct their advocacy. This talk is based on a chapter in the Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy, “A marketplace for privacy: incentives for privacy engineering and innovation,” co-authored with Courtney Bowman. Speaker: John Grant joined Palantir Technologies in September 2010 as the company’s first Civil Liberties Engineer. He began his career in the Senate as an aide to Senator Peter Fitzgerald before joining the staff of former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Republican leadership, Senator Lamar Alexander. While working for Senator Alexander on issues ranging from the federal budget to homeland security, John attended law school at Georgetown University. He earned his law degree shortly after joining the staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. As Counsel to Ranking Member Senator Susan Collins, John handled the Committee’s intelligence and privacy and civil liberties portfolios. He conducted oversight of numerous programs within the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. intelligence community as well as investigations into intelligence failures that led to the attacks at Fort Hood and the failed 2009 Christmas Day bombings. As a Civil Liberties Engineer at Palantir, John has worked with customers all over the world, helping them to develop data protection practices that make the best use of Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties protective capabilities. John is a co-author of The Architecture of Privacy (O’Reilly 2015) and most recently co-authored a chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy, “A Marketplace for Privacy: Incentives for Privacy Engineering and Innovation.” (Cambridge UP, 2018)