Admission includes appies and a highball or glass of wine or beer.

The Internet has us hooked. We’re immersed in online shopping, banking, gaming, and dating and sharing our lives on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. And increasingly, we have no choice but to share our personal information.  Like it or not, that means we have to trust online businesses to protect our data.

But are we happy about that? Not really. Research suggests that we all care deeply about our privacy and dislike and distrust  the ubiquity of online surveillance, especially in the spaces they communicate and play. Our daily experiences all those privacy statements and policies seem unapproachable, awkward, and obtuse. And, as businesspeople, we're concerned with acting ethically and within the boundaries of the seemingly ever-changing law.

Online privacy expert Chris Parsons will lead a discussion on why online businesses don't have our trust and how they can earn it.  His advice? Businesses need to develop privacy ethics to supplement legally required privacy statements. By adopting clear statements of ethics, supplemented with legal language and opt-in data disclosures of personal information, operators of social media environments can be part of the solution, not the problem .

Christopher Parsons is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, a member of the New Transparency Project, and lead researcher of Deep Packet Inspection Canada. He is interested in how privacy (particularly informational privacy, expressive privacy, and accessibility privacy) is affected by digitally mediated surveillance, and the normative implications this has in contemporary Western political systems. His research currently focuses on the technologies facilitating digitally mediated surveillance, such as deep packet inspection, behavioural advertising, and radio frequency identification. He is particularly curious about how these technologies influence citizens in their decisions to openly express themselves or engage in self-censoring behaviour. His research is funded through a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.