Dr. Anurag Mehra (IIT-Bombay) will give a talk about how the pandemic created a situation where infections needed to be tracked. Many agencies—especially government ones—created an infrastructure that could be used to locate and track Covid-19 patients. This provided an opportunity for agencies—notably those in countries with authoritarian regimes—to capture personal data indiscriminately and disproportionately, without any legal safeguards as to how this data would be handled. This talk examines these surveillance regimes, including the technologies that were used, as well as the privacy and security norms that were violated.

Professor Mehra is a Visiting Professor in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at Vassar College this semester. He is a chemical engineering faculty member at IIT Bombay, where he is also associate faculty in the Center for Policy Studies, and the Professor In Charge of the Center for Liberal Education

Campus community only, please.