Navigating Privacy in a Data-Driven World
“What does it mean for people actually working with data, people monitoring data, people analyzing data, people selling data? What does it mean to actually be thinking about privacy as a human right?” Future of Privacy Forum CEO Jules Polonetsky posed these questions at the beginning of his keynote, Navigating Privacy in a Data-Driven World: Treating Privacy as a Human Right, at RSA Conference 2020 in San Francisco on February 26.
During the keynote session, Polonetsky discussed the limitations of consumer protection laws in protecting individuals’ privacy and explored how to best safeguard data to protect human rights. He expressed the importance of instituting laws that support de-identification and pseudonymization, and of independent academics being able to access data for the benefit of research and society.
“Are corporations having too much power over individuals because of how much data they have? Are foreign countries interfering in our elections? Are automated decisions being made where I’ll be turned down for healthcare, I’ll be turned down for insurance, my probation will be extended?” asked Polonetsky. “These are not privacy issues, right? These are issues of power. These are issues of human rights at the end of the day.”