I recorded this interview 13 years ago.

It should feel dated by now. It doesn’t. It feels like a prophecy.

Back in 2013, Dr. Ann Cavoukian sat down with me as the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario and the mind behind Privacy by Design. She told me privacy was not dead. She told me security and freedom were not a trade-off. She told me metadata reveals more about you than the content ever could.

Then she said something I have never been able to shake:

“We have to protect privacy globally, or we protect it nowhere.”

Think about where we are now. Surveillance is the business model. Your data trains systems you will never see. The “nothing to hide” crowd got louder, and the borders she warned about got thinner. She saw all of it coming.

So here is the question I keep returning to: if privacy really is what it means to be human, what part of yourself are you giving away by default?

Watch the full conversation. It lands differently in 2026.

Full interview [ https://www.singularityweblog.com/ann-cavoukian-privacy-by-design/](https://www.singularityweblog.com/ann-cavoukian-privacy-by-design/)

Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian on Privacy by Design & why metadata is more important than content. See her interview on SingularityWeblog.com