Your privacy, your data.
As Giorgio was estating past Wednesday, our session started with a kind of a joke when you enter the theater, an an italian, a german, and a spaniard get on the stage… and you have to guess what the name of the show is: it could be as the title for this short piece goes, “Your privacy, your data”.
Privacy, anonymity and security were on the focus of an open debate we tried to enrich with the vision from Giorgio and Jens within the context of #EmpoderaLIVE thanks to Cybervolunteers Foundation.
We have to take into account that the right to privacy or private life is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 12), the European Convention of Human Rights (Article 8) and the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 7). On the other hand, in April 2016, the EU adopted a new legal framework, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Data Protection Directive for the law enforcement and police area. Fully applicable across the EU in May 2018, the GDPR is the most comprehensive and progressive piece of data protection legislation in the world
We had the opportunity to have an open conversation with two geeks talking on behalf of two different initiatives, Tor and Interpeer. We are talking about two different projects, in terms of their approach, and their history: while Tor is a very well-known initiative with a relatively long history associated to a handful of equally well-known milestones, Interpeer is a recently funded NGI project with a systemic approach to a series of quite challenging technical issues associated to privacy and security of communications in building a truly digital society for all.
In order to showcase the potentiality of both projects in terms of (social) innovation we were trying to prompt each other issuing a series of open questions that must be able to support such a debate beyond #EmpoderaLIVE digging deeper in some key points.
One of such focal points for a debate could be the way we cope with privacy, anonymity and security concerns. The socioeconomic scenario has deeply changed since the onion routing project began, back in the mid 1990s. We could say we have been relatively successful in building a more digital society; and hence we, as citizens, are more aware of the way we have been insecurely sharing personal information and sensitive data with a lot of (social) media moguls, legally allowing them to explode such data as raw material.
While you can review our session’s recording on Youtube, there are many questions that would be worth answering: Do we still associate Tor with the Dark side of the Web? Tor is probably the most well-known darknet on the Internet, and any person accessing it through Tor browser, for instance, is going to be exposed to any content coming from any kind of dark webs you could image; and hence the questions from our audience highlighting the fact that while we can use Tor for bypassing censorship in many places or in the event of some kind of ‘events’, there are a lot of people using it for illicit purposes.
We can approach the point from a different angle. I’m an engineer: I really love technology. I still remember that the research group I was working with for my PhD in the University was called exactly that way, “Next Generation Internet”. I’m still wondering if we would be needing an initiative like Tor, if we would have Interpeer in place as part of some kind of Next Generation Internet’s underlying infrastructure.
Last, but not least, I still have the strong feeling that we don’t manage to cope with the elephant in the room: the human-centric dimension of any of the issues we had put on the table. It’s not only a question of reckoning the human-centric ambition included in the corresponding mission statements of both projects, or the community-based nature of them… My point here is the fact that we need to balance some kind of ‘shared responsibility’ within our digital society, and that’s a philosophical approach in the sense that the technology must be ‘only’ considered the more human attribute we have; and so are the humans responsible for its development and usage.
Anyway, if you're reading this short excerpt from our conversation, you may go for the action points I highlighted as closing remarks last Wednesday: first of all, you would install the browser extension from snowflake proxy for easily contribute to extend Tor network, and secondly, you have the possibility for donating either Tor project, or Interpeer initiative.