Vivian Potts '27 Makes the Case for Data Privacy in The Campus
Vivian Potts ‘27 is a Computer Science major with a double minor in Theatre and Film, a combination that shows in how she writes about technology: technical enough to explain how the systems really work, and enough of a storyteller to make readers care. She is also a proven builder under pressure, having been on the winning team at each of the last two ACM Hackathons at Allegheny. Now, as a contributing writer for The Campus, she is taking on one of the biggest questions in computing today: who has your data, and what are they doing with it?
The Article
In Your data is unimportant because you are unimportant, Potts confronts the common shrug that personal data doesn’t matter. Prompted by a reading in her data science class, she explains how trackers and cookies follow people across the web, and how the same personalization that feels convenient can quietly hide job listings from some applicants, steer people in debt toward high-interest payday loans, or raise prices for shoppers who seem willing to pay.
She then follows the trail offline, citing investigations that showed how easily phone location data can be traced back to real people, and how it could even be bought by bounty hunters, and turns to AI, pointing to a Canadian privacy investigation into whether ChatGPT users meaningfully consented to their conversations being used for training. Her conclusion isn’t to fear the internet but to understand it: knowing how your information is collected makes you much harder to exploit.