This seminar course examines the notion of digital data as a power differential expressed by tools and systems that position privacy and self-actualization against state and commercial surveillance deployed for social control. Lectures and discussions are oriented toward artists, designers, technologists, and practitioners from varied disciplines seeking to reconcile ethical and moral questions involving digital data practices within their own work. The syllabus opens with a brief survey of the history of digital technology since 1945 followed by a grounding of key concepts related to data privacy. This includes potential legal protections as a means of governing the uses and abuses of surveillance tools and techniques. In the latter part of the semester, the syllabus pivots toward a comparative study of the dominant international models of data rights, contrasting the different philosophical, cultural, political, and legal models in the US, the EU, China, India, and what the industry refers to as Rest-of-World. Special attention will be paid to certain special topics including: the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook mass data abuse scandal that emerged from the 2016 US presidential elections representing a critical shift in attitudes about data privacy; an intensive discussion of so-called dark patterns in UI/UX design which seek to manipulate users to perform actions against their preferences; a tactical examination of the second Trump administration’s aggressive exploitation of government and commercial data; and new considerations of data privacy abuse by large language models and agentic AI platforms. This course fulfills the academic elective requirement for the MFA Design and Technology program but is open to all majors regardless of technical skills. Evaluation will be conducted as handwritten exams in essay blue books at the midterm and final.