Thank you so much for this award and for bringing me to Amsterdam to receive it. As a person who’s spent the last decade writing about privacy law, it’s really refreshing to get away from America and come to a place where it actually exists. Privacy is sacred and absolutely respected here, right?

I have a confession to make. When I first started writing about privacy and technology 10 years ago on a blog I named The Not-So Private PartsThe Not-So Private Parts, I considered myself a privacy skeptic. I thought the media were often alarmist when writing about privacy violations by tech companies and that they weren’t putting enough emphasis on all the benefits that come from living a more open, more tracked, and more quantified life. Free email! Google Flu Trends! Ads that offer you things you actually want to buy! The ability to Facebook stalk all of your exes!

But one day pretty early in my career, the Wall Street Journal asked me to write an op-ed about why privacy was overrated and should be killed off. I had a month to do it, and every day I’d sit down and try to write it and I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I didn’t believe it. My stories were about how easy it was to capture information about us, about putting us into massive databases, about predicting our behavior. And about people abusing one another’s privacy, by posting “revenge porn” for example, where people’s exes would post their naked photos online and there was little those people could do about it. And I was increasingly finding what I was writing very disturbing.

I realized I wasn’t a skeptic. I was a pragmatist. There are certainly privacy trade-offs in the modern world and ideally, we’d be able to pick and choose them in an informed way. Like, yes, I want a smart TV that takes voice commands but no I don’t want it to secretly record all the shows I watch so it can sell the intel.