For this episode, (29 min. long) we talk with Danny Weitzner, a proud founding member of the Web Science Trust who will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming 2021 ACM Web Science virtual conference. He’s a 3Com Founders Principal Research Scientist at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and also the founding director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative. His research interests include accountable systems, privacy, cybersecurity and online freedom of expression.

During this conversation, Danny takes us back to the start of web science and explores challenges that are both old — but still relevant— and new. He talks specifically about what approaches we can take to address privacy on the web. For example, you may have heard of the panopticon, but do you know what countervailance means? Do you know why accountability is so important to privacy? Danny can explain. Most of all, he points out how crucial web science is to solving these problems. To hear about all this and more, listen to the full episode!

Click here for this episode’s transcript, and click here for this episode’s show notes.