Disability, Technology, and Privacy

I have read extensively about disabilities and technology for many years of my life. Privacy was a much more recent topic of interest, and really began in earnest when I started exploring the best ways to avoid negative interaction with the police. An encyclopedia wouldn't begin to cover that topic!

Only in the last 5 years or so have I delved much into the disability advocacy movement. Disabled people have been advocating for ourselves for decades, but technology has really improved communication, access, and ability to live and work in the community. I have slowly added more and more tech to my life and home, as my cognitive and physical abilities have slowly changed. The trade off is in privacy, with so many IoT items being hard-to-impossible to shield from the modern hacker vulnerabilities.

I do use as many privacy tools as I reasonably can, from VPNs to encryption to tweaking device settings. I am fortunate that I still have enough brain cells left to do most of this myself, as no one else in my life and support groups cares OR knows much about the entire field. Those with developmental and intellectual disabilities are among THE most vulnerable to loss of privacy, attack, and exploitation.

Rarely do I find articles that even mention privacy, technology, and the disabled. It seems like both the privacy and tech fields just don't think about the disabled much, beyond the fancy-but-too-expensive gadgets that promise to restore physical ability. Privacy is an issue I've only seen discussed by actually disabled people, and rarely do they cover online privacy.

I am no expert in any of these fields, but somehow I feel someone needs to talk about these three topics as they relate to each other.