Dear colleagues, We invite any submissions to our open panel at 4S 2025, September 3-7, 2025, Seattle WA: /Open panel /The Problem with Privacy /Abstract/ Within the United States, privacy remains a contested and polysemous term. To some, privacy is an amorphous social good; to others, it is a threatened right that must be preserved against intrusion by information technology; to still others, privacy is out-dated or incoherent, an inadequate heuristic for present and future socio-technical realities. Whether privacy should be revitalized or discarded, the concept still holds together a set of affective attachments — we can analyze how instances of ‘privacy’ signify admixtures of belief around the adequacy of U.S. judicial law, the promise of certain tech-led futures, one’s trust in more proximate public and private data actors, and so on. Within the academy, the concept generally iterates heuristics that test novel socio-technical conduct against (more or less conservative) articulations of liberal democratic theory (Nissenbaum 2004, Cohen 2013). In contrast, other work describes the extensive privacy preservation behaviors that individuals or communities practice to protect themselves or how privacy has socially changed over time (Nippert-Eng 2010, Marwick 2023, Igo 2018). In short, ‘privacy’ indexes live tensions — how is the concept made useful, and for who? How do debates around privacy link with broader contestations of technologicalized futures? What relations do privacy practices enact between individuals, communities, tech firms, and the state? This panel invites submissions from scholars who approach privacy through this lens of contestation. We are especially interested in community-engaged research that reflects on the uses (and limitations) of privacy, at a time when the tenets of liberal democracy are increasingly difficult to locate within technology governance. We welcome panelists across a range of fields, such as: urban surveillance and policing, social media and online platforms, healthcare and patient populations, labor. Conveners: Samuel DiBella, Lian Song Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2025 To submit, please go to the 4S submission page <https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_seattle.php> and select panel #56. Best wishes, —Sam