One of the goals behind Access & Privacy Online has always been practical: to surface significant access to information and privacy stories as they unfold. The podcast was designed as a monitoring and learning tool, helping listeners track developments across Canada and internationally, and understand how those stories connect to broader questions of accountability, surveillance, and democratic oversight.

We’re always encouraged to see how others adapt FIPA’s work for their own purposes. The testimonial below offers a particularly strong example of how Access & Privacy Online is being used in an academic setting. As a structured way to engage students with current events, original reporting, and critical analysis beyond algorithm-driven news feeds.

In this reflection, criminology instructor Mike Larsen describes how he has integrated the podcast into an upper-level undergraduate course on surveillance and privacy. By pairing weekly episodes with full-text source material from FIPA’s News Monitoring service, students are prompted to move from summary to substance. Reading primary journalism, making analytical connections, and actively discussing how privacy and surveillance issues play out in real time

The result, as Larsen explains, is a clearer bridge between theory and practice, and a shift from passive consumption of news toward deliberate, critical engagement.

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An educator’s perspective

Using FIPA’s Access & Privacy Online podcast in the classroom

Every Spring, I teach an upper-level undergraduate course on Surveillance, Privacy, and Control in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. My course is always full of students who have started to think seriously about privacy rights and surveillance practices in a digital society, and I am consistently impressed with their insights and engagement.

One persistent challenge when designing and teaching this course has been the need to strike a balance between familiarizing my students with the core concepts and issues in what is – to most of them – a new area of study and setting aside time for the weightier kinds of theorization and analysis that is appropriate for the course level.

This year, I deduced to incorporate an assignment based on FIPA’s Access & Privacy Online podcast, and the results have been outstanding. The podcast’s ‘news roundup’ format is accessible, and the short weekly episodes are easy to fit into my students’ busy schedules. Importantly, every story summarized on the podcast is accompanied by links to the full-text articles available (without paywall) from FIPA’s website. There are a number of excellent long-form podcasts that focus on privacy, but Access & Privacy Online is the only roundup-style show that features good coverage of both Canadian and international stories.

How I use the podcast:

Each of my students is responsible for contributing three current event updates to an online discussion forum throughout the semester. To prepare an update, a student listens to an episode of Access & Privacy Online (about 20 minutes in length), selects a specific surveillance or privacy story of interest, and then reads the original publication via FIPA’s News Monitoring service.

The student then prepares a short forum post that provides a brief overview of the story and a short commentary. Commentary components can vary in content, but I encourage students to use the opportunity to connect the current event(s) in question to themes we are exploring in the course.

We set aside time at the start of each week’s lesson to check the forum, take note of recent posts, and chat about the group’s impressions and issues arising. For me, this is a fantastic opportunity to pull recent and relevant examples into my lesson plan for the day, and for my students, it provides a clear bridge between major course themes and the events unfolding around them.

I think that colleagues teaching courses in any of the many fields that intersect surveillance and privacy could find Access & Privacy Online to be a valuable resource.