Desperate times call for desperate measures, or so the adage goes. And these are desperate times. With high death tolls, rising unemployment, and a virus that continues to befuddle us all, it is no wonder that our governments, weakened by years of austerity, are reaching for extraordinary tools to flatten the curve. But while measures may be desperate, they should also be appropriate, lawful and just.

Topic

Over the course of this pandemic, our governments have reached for technologies and surveillance tools to help them coordinate the crisis. Often without much transparency or oversight. Here I detail some of those developments and discuss various data governance models that could help us keep data and technology under public control, while making its benefits available to the public good.

A talk that covers:
– Outsourcing of key digital services to big tech and the data sharing arrangements that come with it (and how that’s been ramped up since Covid-19).
– What privacy concerns we should be wary of
– What different data governance models we may want to consider to keep our data safe and under democratic control (specifically data trusts).

The talk will be for about 30-40 minutes long, with 20-30 minutes allotted for questions afterwards.

Speaker

Anouk Ruhaak: Anouk is a London-based Mozilla Fellow researching privacy, data stewardship, and AI. Anouk is eager to deliver a IEEE “Connecting Leaders” talk about the ways powerful tech platforms are collecting health data during the pandemic. Anouk recently wrote an open letter to the UK’s NHS on this topic, which has garnered attention from The New Statesman and The Register.
Anouk is a Mozilla Fellow embedded at the German organization Algorithm Watch, where she studies new and ethical ways to govern data (and, as a result, artificial intelligence).

Anouk has a background in computer science; here’s a recent piece she wrote for WIRED magazine in the U.S.: Data Brokers Are Cruising for a Bruising