Name: Why Privacy Matters: The Essential Lessons
Start: 2025-04-17T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Monday Night Brewing - Social Club (Monday Night Brewing Social Club)

Why Privacy Matters: The Essential Lessons

We're Discourse BHAM, a pop-up public lecture series bringing the most interesting academic talks to Birmingham's bars & breweries. It's like a college class, but there's drinking.
Tickets are $15. Seating is limited.
Join us for a lively, no-nonsense talk about why privacy matters, why it’s essential for a fulfilling life, and practical ways you can protect yours—without throwing away your phone or laptop or sounding like you live in a bunker somewhere off the grid.
But isn’t privacy, like, basically dead already? Isn’t it just ego maniacs and conspiracy theorists who think the government really cares about their text messages? Isn’t the issue mostly about companies advertising better? And the government keeping us safe? It’s unreasonable to think we’re all going to just stop using our phones and laptops... I mean, if you’re not doing anything wrong then you should have nothing to hide, right?
This Discourse will make sense of these things. No doom, no drama—just clear, useful insights from a leading privacy scholar you can actually use to assert your privacy in the modern world.
This is a DiscourseBHAM special event in partnership with Birmingham’s own Thank You Books, celebrating the launch of the speaker’s new book On Privacy: 20 Lessons to Live By.
Everyone will receive:
✅ A free privacy slide for their laptop
✅ Punchy no-nonsense language to explain why your privacy matters
✅ Easy, real-world steps to better protect your data—without ditching your phone or laptop
✅ A signed copy of the book (if you want to buy one there)
Dr. Lawrence Cappello is an award-winning professor of U.S. legal & constitutional history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age and the newly released On Privacy: Twenty Lessons to Live By. His work on the right to privacy has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Hill, and other media outlets.