University of Alberta, Canada
Mike Zajko is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology at the University of Alberta, studying the social roles and responsibilities of internet intermediaries in Canada. His research interests include surveillance and policing, copyright, social development, and climate change. I am interested in the roles of responsibilities of internet service providers (ISPs) in Canada. One of these responsibilities is to assist state actors in their surveillance and identification efforts. Another responsibility that ISPs have is to protect customer privacy. How these competing roles and responsibilities are resolved depends on the law: what the law demands, and what the law allows. Canada, like many countries, is grappling with the question of what counts as our private information in this digital era, and who can share this information with whom. Our ISPs are often in the middle of these legal and ethical debates, making active choices about what data to collect and who to share it with.
Around the World 2014 archived video link: