Social Insecurities: Privacy and Personal Data in Modern America

What can the Social Security number tell us about the ways citizens have across the last century imagined their affiliation to the U.S. state but also to their own “personal” data? In this lecture, Sarah Igo charted Americans’ relationships with their 9-digit identifiers to explore the changing complex of identity, identification, and privacy in the modern context.

This was the fifth and final event in the The Data Deluge: Privacy in a Connected World series hosted by UW–Superior on Thursday, April 28, 2022 from 1– 2:30 p.m. on the Main Floor of the Dan Hill Library. A virtual option was available via YouTube.

Sarah E. Igo is the Andrew Jackson Professor of History and Dean of Strategic Initiatives for the School of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. Igo teaches and writes about modern American intellectual, cultural, legal, and political history, with research interests in the production of knowledge, the politics of data, the human sciences, and the history of privacy and the public sphere.

View recordings of the four previous events in this series on Data After Death with Alexis Elder, How Do We Not Be Facebook? with Dorothea Salo, Academic Surveillance with Sarah Lamdan, and Death and Privacy with Natalie Lynner.