Topics

Artificial Intelligence and its applications are a part of everyday life: from social media newsfeeds to mediating traffic flow in cities, from autonomous cars to connected consumer devices like smart assistants, spam filters, voice recognition systems, and search engines.

Unique data, generated from characteristics of humans, may be used to track and profile people across their lives.

Governments compel companies to store data on their customers and the data they generate through using communications services.

As digital communications grow, governments continue to seek new ways of getting access to content and metadata.

Effective competition is necessary for privacy and innovation. Increasingly the digital economy is characterised by a few companies in dominant positions. These companies are able to impose terms and conditions onto users that exploit their data, and which are detrimental to users’ privacy.

The long arm of governments now reach across their borders, and the safeguards rarely extend to data in other jurisdictions.

Protecting and defending individuals, devices and networks should form the basis of any cyber security strategy. 

Political campaigns around the world have turned into sophisticated data operations. They rely on data to facilitate a number of decisions: where to hold rallies, which States or constituencies to focus resources on, which campaign messages to focus on in which area, and how to target supporters, undecided voters, and non-supporters.

Data Protection laws seek to protect people's data by providing individuals with rights over their data, imposing rules on the way in which companies and governments use data, and establishing regulators to enforce the laws.

As development and humanitarian organisations deploy new technologies and make use of data-intensive systems in their programmes, they must consider what their mandate of “Doing no harm” entails in the digital age.

Changes in the financial sector provides opportunities to develop privacy-protecting instruments; unfortunately, the efforts of the industry are not very often put in this direction.

Secret agreements allow secretive intelligence agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the USA to spy on the world.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the EU’s new data protection law. The GDPR came into effect on 25 May 2018, and reformed and replaced data protection law across Europe. Before the GDPR, data protection in the EU was governed by the 1995 Data Protection Directive, which required countries within the EU to pass national laws implementing provisions within the Directive. GDPR applies directly in all Members States and is supplemented by national legislation.

Covert manipulation of and interferences with peoples' devices and software creates significant surveillance capabilities.

People are reduced to their government- and industry- issued identities, even while these systems collect more data, creating new forms of exclusion and profiling.

In its rush to connect everything, industry increases insecurity and generates more data beyond people's control.

Indiscriminate surveillance of non-suspects is a contravention of rights and a failure of the rule of law.

Individuals are vulnerable at the border of a foreign country, and technologies and laws are deepening this problem.

Advances in technology significantly advance the capabilities of police, with few safeguards and no transparency.

Automated decision-making, about people, from people's data, will shape their lives -- what they have access to, what they can do, and what they may become.

Wealthy governments increasingly push and enable other governments to deploy advanced surveillance capabilities without safeguards.

Cities full of sensors that monitor peoples' activities, generating intelligence for use by companies and governments.

The data generated through peoples' use of social media becomes valuable intelligence to others, who want to monitor, profile, and manipulate.