Friday Night AI: Rethinking Privacy in the Age of AI: Who’s Watching, Who’s Protecting

Rethinking Privacy in the Age of AI: Who’s Watching, Who’s Protecting

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in our daily lives—from personalized recommendations to censorship and surveillance—questions about privacy have taken on new significance. What happens to the data we generate? Who has access, and how is it being used? While AI offers powerful tools for everything from fraud detection to healthcare, it also raises complex ethical and legal concerns around personal freedom, consent, and control over our digital identities. Join us for a conversation with experts in AI, digital rights, and censorship as we explore how emerging technologies are reshaping the boundaries of privacy. We’ll discuss where protections are falling short, what policies are evolving, and how we can build systems that balance innovation with personal agency.

Panelists: Florian Schaubb, Roya Ensafi, Rada Mihalcea

Rada Mihalcea

Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in natural language processing, with a focus on multimodal processing and computational social sciences. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and served as ACL President (2018-2022 Vice/Past). She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).

Florian Schaub

Florian Schaub is an associate professor of Information and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. His interdisciplinary research combines privacy, human-computer interaction, emerging technologies, and public policy. He studies people’s privacy decision making and behavior, investigates technology-related privacy implications, and develops human-centric privacy solutions that help people better manage their privacy in technology contexts.. His research has been honored with the 2019 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and with best paper awards at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), the USENIX Security Symposium, and the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). Dr. Schaub is a DARPA Young Faculty Award recipient. His research has directly impacted industry practice and public policy, including the rulemaking process for the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Dr. Schaub and his work are frequently featured in national and international news media.

Roya Ensafi

Roya Ensafi is an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, where her research focuses on Internet security and privacy, with the goal of creating techniques and systems to better protect users online. She is particularly passionate about online censorship, geo-discrimination, surveillance, and related threats to Internet freedom. Prof. Ensafi is the founder of Censored Planet, a global censorship observatory. She has studied Russia’s throttling of Twitter, HTTPS interception in Kazakhstan, and China’s Great Cannon attack, among many other instances of network interference. She is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER, Google Faculty Research Award, multiple IRTF Applied Networking Research Prizes, and the Consumer Reports Digital Lab fellowship. Her work has been cited in popular publications such as The New York Times, Newsweek, Business Insider, Wired, and Ars Technica.