Consent Isn’t a Checkbox: Privacy, Power, and Your Digital Self with Pegah Parsi

A flawless-looking LinkedIn photo sparks a much bigger conversation about consent, control, and the digital doubles that follow us everywhere. In this episode, we sit down with Pegah K Parsi, JD, MBA Chief Privacy Officer at UC San Diego, to unpack why privacy is a fundamental right — and how that belief quietly shapes our everyday decisions online and at work.

Pegah introduces a deceptively simple framework with outsized impact: privacy across body, space, and data. From medical choices and physical boundaries to algorithms curating our feeds, she reframes privacy as the right to decide who gets access to what, for which purpose, and for how long. That lens turns scattered anxieties about filters, tagging, and creepy ads into one clear question: how do we reclaim control of our digital identity without opting out of modern life?

We also get practical about building real connection in remote and hybrid teams. Think agenda-free coffee chats, meetings that start with genuine check-ins, and yes — the occasional unannounced phone call just to say hello. The conversation doesn’t dodge the gray areas either: personalization versus manipulation, research benefits versus surveillance risks, and the ethics of editing or posting images of others on professional platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered why your phone feels like it’s reading your mind — or debated whether touching up a colleague’s photo crosses a line — this episode gives you language, principles, and habits you can use immediately. Expect a grounded take on data brokers, consent that’s more than a checkbox, and small rituals that make digital work feel human again.

Ready for more human-centered stories from the leaders shaping our digital world? Subscribe to Humans of Tech on your favorite platform and check out our merch store here: https://humansoftech.axomo.com

Transcript

Cold Open And Show Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Ever wonder what tech leaders would say if they had no prep and no redoes? Welcome to Humans of Tech. I'm Caroline. And I'm Kelly. We're keeping humans at the center of technology through quick, authentic conversations with people shaping the industry.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

We've got three rules. No prep, no editing, and one live random question. Our guest never sees coming.

The Edited Photo Dilemma

SPEAKER_01 0:24

All right. Tell me the story. You've been dying to tell me.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

This is such a funny story. So I had um I went on LinkedIn this morning. I was at a happy hour yesterday for work, and we took a bunch of pictures. Got on LinkedIn and I see some of the pictures, and there's a close-up of a colleague and myself, and I look at them like, damn, my skin looks flawless. Like I was, I was like, holy cow, that lighting. This is amazing. What a great, like, what a great picture. So I go to the text message to text messages to text this woman. Yeah. Could you send me that picture? Because I want to post it, right? Yeah, yeah. Except that I see she had already sent it. Oh. Look at this photo. It's not the same photo. She edited it because I looked at the picture that I got texted yesterday and I'm like, my skin does not look flawless. I do have bag of bags under my eyes. Many uh freckles. And I was like, what are the rules here? Is someone else allowed to touch up? I don't ever put filters on my pictures.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

We're just makeup.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

I don't really like do the filter thing. Um, so I don't know. What are your thoughts? Can other people make you look more beautiful and post it on social media?

SPEAKER_01 1:42

That's really interesting. Um, I would say I don't do it. I only do it to my own post. Like I feel like I'm like, okay, you know, I'll make it. Um hi.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

You may want to jump in on this. You're on mute. You're on mute. Sorry.

SPEAKER_02 1:57

I joined early. I just want to make sure my audio is okay, but I've interrupted something. I apologize.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

No, not at all. You'll you'll I'll I'll recap the story shortly. So I basically saw a picture that somebody else posted of me on LinkedIn and I was flabbergasted at how great I looked. Like my phone looked amazing. And I asked her to send me the picture. And when I see the original photo, that is not what I look like. I had bags under my eyes. So she edited the photo of us and put it on. So we were saying, What's the line here? Because I don't normally edit any of my pictures that I put up. So, like, where's the line of can you edit someone else's look and post it on social media or not? I just thought that was funny.

SPEAKER_01 2:35

I was about to say, I feel like a filter, like light filter on my side. Like that, but uh not really on LinkedIn, actually. I don't, my Instagram is totally different than you know, LinkedIn. I feel like I don't really edit things for LinkedIn, but I mean, I don't know. What's your take, Pega?

Consent And Posting Others Online

SPEAKER_02 2:52

Uh, I'm more concerned about whether or not they had your consent to post it at all. I'm in that lucky position where I'm uh such a privacy uh person that everyone is afraid to post photos of me without asking. So funny.

SPEAKER_00 3:08

So I used to feel that way about my my nephew. My my sister, when she first had her nephew, came down hard on everybody that she wanted zero pictures of him on social media. So I'd always be like, Hey, is this one okay? His back's on there, and da-da-da.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

And eventually she caved because she was desperate to show friends and family like oftentimes I'd see a smiley face over like baby's photos, you know, that's but I never thought it about uh thought about it for myself.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

So do you not post anything? What's your what's your rule of thought?

SPEAKER_02 3:38

I post things. Um I just uh if I'm posting some of someone else's photo or someone else's information, I always ask them if it's okay. If I'm sharing anything at any point, I ask them if it's okay, right? Same as like if somebody asks me um what's Kelly's phone number, I will probably ask Kelly, is it okay if I share your phone number? Right. So before I do that. Um now, whether or not editing your photo is okay, that's uh you know another step. That's another consent issue. Yeah. Um and and I think it matters if it's sort of a light touch-up to make you look just the take out basics. Right. Um, as opposed to like actually altering significant things

Guest Intro: UCSD Chief Privacy Officer

SPEAKER_02 4:22

about you. I think that would be different.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

What a timely story, Caroline. Um, and we haven't introduced you yet. So um I'll introduce you and then we'll kind of go into our normal. Does that work? Um, so Pega Parsi is the chief privacy officer at um UC San Diego. And she which is one of the top research universities in the world, people. So we are so happy to have you on, uh, Pega.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Um so shall shall we dig right in? Can I ask can I pull a question

The Random Question: Human Connection Remotely

SPEAKER_00 4:57

today?

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Yeah, because I don't have mine in my bowl.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

So so what we do, Pega, I don't know if you're like super well aware. We have this uh fish bowl and we just pull out a random question and we just hope that you answer authentically. Terrifying, not scary, and we always end up learning something new from everybody.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

So it's always like the perfect question for that person, too.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

So it always turns out that way. All right, so okay. It's a tough one. Um how do you create how do you create as because I'm thinking about how I would answer? I'm sorry. How how do you create meaningful human human connections in a remote or hybrid workplace?

SPEAKER_02 5:40

Oh, okay. Um that is a good question for me because I do work remotely. I work fully remotely. So um I make sure that first of all, I anytime there's a Zoom meeting or something like that, that I spend a little bit of time having chit-chat with people. Not a small talk like in the in the way some people do, but to actually have a meaningful conversation, ask them about their kids and whatever's going on in their lives. Um I also have to come to campus on occasion. So when I do, I make sure that I touch face with people and put some FaceTime in when I can. It's a very difficult thing to do, to have meaningful, meaningful connections because it's so easy just to hop in and hop out. I think everyone I think a lot of people experience that during the pandemic, where you just come in, you don't have time. Everyone's been staring at the squares all day. You're tired, you just want to get to the agenda and get the heck out of there. But some of the most meaningful things happened when people at the beginning would say, I really want to know how everybody is doing right now. Times are hard, times are difficult. How are you doing? So I've taken that to heart and I try to do that and ask people in a sort of genuine way, not in this throwaway way, how they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

It's a hard thing. About the not a throwaway point. You know, people ask questions just sometimes to ask how, oh, how are you doing? It's like not intentional, but asking those intentional questions. Carolyn, what were you gonna say? Sorry, cut you off.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

No, I I used to, and I have I haven't done it in a while. I kind of diverted to something that I feel might be easier, but I used to set up um coffee talks with people just to like grab a coffee and chat because I think that we get used to going from one meeting to the next and that's the only time we're connecting. But putting in 15 minutes without an agenda, not to talk about work, just to like have a coffee and just chit-chat about something else was really helpful. And I um I have like a little post-it note here that reminds me on days that like I'm not, that I don't feel like I'm things don't feel right where things, you know, some days you have some days where you feel like you're not moving the needle and um it's just not going great. Um, I'll just go through my phone and call either an old colleague or a current tech partner just to say hello and say something like just to say hello and see how they're doing. Again, no agenda. And I feel that like really, really helps, at least for me personally. I'm glad you said that.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

I was actually going to say the same thing. Um, my friends got mad at me because they were like, it's it's 20 that time, 2020. Who makes a phone call? Why are you calling me? Is something wrong? But after a while, uh people I think got

Practical Rituals For Real Connection

SPEAKER_02 8:20

used to getting cold calls from me just to say, Hey, I don't have anything. I'm just saying, hey, how's it going?

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Have you been in this role pre and post-COVID? Or did you come in? Okay, so you did have a world in which maybe you were more were you always remote?

SPEAKER_02 8:34

No. Okay, so I was fully fully in person before.

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Yeah, that's a huge difference.

SPEAKER_02 8:41

Huge. And you know, you don't have occasion to run into people grabbing coffee or lunch or walking around campus, going to the bathroom, like walking to the bathroom or going to get water.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

See anyone? It's like I see my dog.

SPEAKER_02 8:55

Right. So you have to make those things happen for yourself. You do.

SPEAKER_00 8:58

Um, I'm gonna go totally off our normal script before we stop, but I think you gave such an interesting perspective about LinkedIn and consent and what, not given your role, like is there any advice you'd give to folks out there in terms of like privacy basics? I know I just threw something out, like something something that we should be thinking about that maybe we don't think about on a regular basis when it comes to using ourselves out there? There's so much.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

That's a huge question. That can take up the rest of the day for me. Um, yes, of course. So uh I like to start with basics with people because sometimes when you talk about privacy um to the lay audience, they don't know what you're quite talking about. And unfortunately here in the US, we've taken to thinking about privacy um either in just a purely sort of consumer rights issue or you know, around identity theft or social security numbers or that sort of thing. Um, or we think of it as a surveillance matter in a law and order context, um, like, oh, the police need this, it's a security issue, let's give it to them, or the police need this, no, it's a surveillance issue, let's not give it to them. But then we lose the nuance of everything else that privacy entails. So I like to start by just talking about what privacy is and why it matters to people, um, so that we don't think about it in just this sort of small, um, narrow way. And that's to say that privacy is really, at the end of the day, about having control over yourself. That sounds like a uh kind of a made-up definition. But when we talk about privacy, we're talking about not just confidentiality and keeping

Privacy Basics Beyond Buzzwords

SPEAKER_02 10:41

things kind of walled off or secret or just confidential. Uh what we're talking about is having the ability to say who has access to what about us. So, for example, um, when we talk about something like bodily privacy, when we talk about bodily privacy, we're talking about who has access to our body for what? Do we do medical research? Do you get a vaccine? Do you have do you give sexual consent? Do you have contraceptives, right? Do you can you get an abortion? Abortion is a huge bodily privacy issue. Um, when we talk about um our our our space, our you know, warrants, whether or not law enforcement can come and rummage through our car or house or whatever, right? That's about who has access to our stuff. Then the same thing about personal data, um, when we talk about in the digital space, it really isn't about just saying, no, no, no one has access to my information or to my data. It's about saying, okay, you can have access to my digital profile or my digital footprint for this purpose, but not for this purpose. Um, you can use it to uh, you know, uh do some research or something, or to give me personalized Netflix recommendations, but don't use it for to give it to law enforcement, right? So you can have different um different sort of understanding of what you're okay with and what you're not. So what I tell people is to get out of this business of thinking about privacy in these sort of small ways, and instead think about, at least in the digital sense, to think about their entire digital profile, to think about everything that exists out in the digital world

Bodily, Spatial, And Data Privacy

SPEAKER_02 12:22

about them. There are so many data points that are just we're spewing out all day, every day. You know, I have my phone next to me 24-7. I am not away from that thing. That is collecting my location, it knows who I'm calling, it knows you know what app I'm using, it knows everything it has access to my camera. Um right now, we're on Zoom. It's collecting a lot of information. So we're just spewing out stuff all over the place. All of that is captured by different entities, different data brokers and different data aggregators to create these different profiles of you. So there's a there's digital Kelly's that exist, digital care lines that exist, digital pegas that exist. And what I tell people is to think about that entire digital you, as opposed to thinking just about, well, I'm putting this one photo on Instagram. Who cares about this one photo? What I tell them is think about your entire thing and what you've contributed to that. So that's a very long answer to what you're saying. And I don't think I've given you like a specific thing that people should. No, you know, no, I think you opened up my mind.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Yeah, you opened up my mind to the whole aspect. I didn't even think about, you know, the the the three main pieces, right? The the body piece, the space. I think I only ever really think about it from the digital perspective. Yeah. Right. Of course. There's so much more.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

Of course. And they interlink together, right? We use a lot of data to um talk about our bodily privacy or our space or you know, our location where we've been, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:52

Yeah, I think oftentimes you think of kind of like it as like a bad thing, like what if someone catches what I what they saw me doing or whatever, but it's like also a good thing to help with um solving crimes quicker because there are so much is so much more surveillance out there. So it's so interesting in this world. You like Google yourself and you your name, you know. I feel like a while ago you would just Google your name and see what comes up. And it's like, is that the there's probably a lot more than that because you're not chat GPT.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

What we I should ask ChatGPT what you there's a significant body of information about you again, uh being, you know, bought and sold and packaged and repackaged in different ways from the obvious things like your social security number, your email address, your you know, employee ID and all of that, to little things about you, like what websites you visit, how long do you stay on there? Um, do you watch your videos at two times speed? So do you do you shop in the middle of the night? Are you a compulsive shopper? You know, and so you can imagine when that all of that goes into your digital profile, that can be used for good, that can be used by a researcher, for example, to help with any number of things in the human condition. Or it can be used for nefarious purposes by somebody that wants to get you to spend your money a certain way or get your eyeballs on something a certain way, or make you vote a certain way. So um I tell people just because there's a digital profile of you or data are collected about you, that's not on its own a good or a bad thing. What matters is who has access information.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

I'll say I was most impressed. I've recently, and I hadn't told anybody about this because I find it kind of weird. Um, anytime I wash my hair, I feel like it's not getting clean properly. And I had only thought about this. I have not researched, I have not done anything open anymore. I was like, I wonder if um the the like the if I change the water filter in my thing, if it would so yesterday I got into the shower and I tried to take off the shower head, it didn't work, and then I left it. That's all that's the extent. My phone does not stop giving me ads for shower water filters. And I'm like, how? I was by myself.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

The camera, the front camera and the back camera, probably.

SPEAKER_00 16:06

I don't even know if my phone was in the bathroom. And I'm just like fascinated.

The Data Profile You Don’t See

SPEAKER_00 16:10

I was like, this is so that's the part, that's the line that gets me uncomfortable. I don't want someone talking about it.

SPEAKER_02 16:15

Of course, of course, creepy as a word of art in the privacy discipline.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Yes, and so how did you get into this space?

SPEAKER_02 16:24

Yeah. Um another, another long answer for you. I'm sorry. You you had a verbose guest here today. No, so I um went to law school because I wanted to do human rights work. That was very important to me. Um you know, mid-aughts um when I went to law school. Um, but then by the time I graduated, um, I was in the recession, and human rights is already just notoriously difficult to get into anyway. But then the recession, nobody was hiring, but just a lot going on. So um I continued doing the work I was doing during law school, which was working for the university, um, doing like contracts and things like that. Um important work, um, interesting work, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't the thing that that moves that moves that was moving my soul. Um but you know, I I put my um everything into it. I worked hard, as as you should, I think in everything. You should do the best that you can, even if you don't like it. Uh or you don't, you know, it's not it's not the soul mover you want it to be. Anyway, so um I continued doing that kind of work at various universities um and learning a lot about research and and higher ed and all of that. Um, but then um I started seeing more and more privacy terms in contracts. And I started asking questions and just saying, what is this? What does that mean? Do we comply with this? Do we have this program? Can I sign off on this? And I think I annoyed my boss by asking too many questions. And so when a developmental assignment came up, he said, Why don't you go to the privacy office? Um, I was at Stanford at the time. He said, Why don't you go to the privacy office and you learn it? Um, so I went to the Stanford Privacy Office. Um, I was only supposed to be there for six months on a rotational assignment. Um, but once I got there, I first was just cutting my teeth on the compliance pieces and just understanding the various laws. But uh very quickly, the uh the civil liberties and the civil rights issue and the human rights issue of privacy and the fact that it is a fundamental right that so many other things rely on, very quickly that opened itself up to me. And so um then I fell into it just completely. Your soul was beating. Somehow I ended up exactly where I was supposed to be doing, um, a part of human rights that I had no idea even existed. Um so now I spend a lot of time talking about ethics and uh and privacy as that fundamental right and as a civil liberty issue.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

I love that. Wow, thanks for sharing. Yeah, well, Pega, we loved having you. We're gonna stop the recording here, hang tight for a second, but thanks for joining us and sharing this. Thanks for hanging out with us on Humans of Tech.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

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SPEAKER_00 19:15

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