[Freeport, Ill.] — Highland Community College’s Clarence Mitchell Library will present “The Embattled 4th Amendment: Protecting your privacy when the 4th Amendment doesn’t protect you” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, September 16, 2026 in the library for Constitution Day.
Guest speaker Dorothea Salo will speak about the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the challenges of keeping digital data secure.
The 4th Amendment to the Constitution is supposed to protect us against unreasonable searches, and put boundaries around government intrusion in our private lives. Unfortunately, the American people’s right to be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” is not commonly interpreted as securing digital data from daily life. What is that data, who collects and uses it, how does it endanger us, and what can we do about it?
Dorothea Salo is Distinguished Teaching Faculty IV in the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Information School. As co-investigator for the Data Doubles research project, she helped investigate undergraduates’ perceptions of privacy around campus Big Data practices. She teaches broadly across information technology, information organization, information security, publishing industries, and information ethics.
The event is free and open to all audiences.
For more information on the program contact Laura Watson at 815-599-3456 or laura.watson@highland.edu.