Privacy Camp turns 10 in 2022 and it’s time to celebrate!
The special anniversary edition of Privacy Camp 2022 will be the occasion to reflect on a decade of digital activism, and to think together about the best ways to advance human rights in the digital age.
Check out the draft schedule now to find out what you can expect from the 10th edition of Privacy Camp. The event will take place online on 25 January 2022 from 9.00 to 17.30 CET.
The event will use an open source and privacy friendly tool called Big Blue Button. Participants will receive instructions on how to join prior to the event.
Sessions
In response to our call for panels, we have received proposal tackling the subject from a variety of perspectives.
The 10th anniversary edition of Privacy Camp offers a forward-looking retrospective on the last decade of digital rights. This online edition aims at building on the lessons of the past and at collectively articulating strategic ways forward for the advancement of human rights in the digital society.
Emerging intersections within the realms of regulating digitalisation as well as within other broader social justice movements point that – while some issues remain timeless – the power struggles ahead might happen on new terrain(s). How can we adapt to these new terrains, while drawing on a decade’s worth of lessons? How can we organise with broader groups of people and other communities? What are the points of reflection we must focus on, to address the wider impact of the digital rights’ fight?
Online registrations for #PrivacyCamp23 are unfortunately closed since 23 January 2023.
If you want to follow the stream online, you will need to register in order to receive the practical instructions.
As we put 10 years of Privacy Camp behind, and with the 11th edition approaching, it is clearer than ever that our main mission continues to guarantee the safeguard of human rights in today’s vigorously changing world. In 2023, the Privacy Camp invites you to participate in, and foster, a discussion about the a world that finds itself in a constant state of crisis, and in which the digital is, itself, critical.
How do digital technologies feed into and foster the multiple crises we inhabit? What do we need to consider when approaching the digital as a critical resource that we should nurture, so to promote and protect rights and freedoms? What does it mean to regulate digital technologies and infrastructures in times of crises?
Join us in answering critical questions during the 11th edition of Privacy Camp. We rely on you.
The final programmeis already available on our website for you to plan the different sessions you’d like to attend.
** UPDATE: The deadline is extended to 14 November 2021, 23:59 CEST.
Privacy Camp turns 10. It is time to celebrate. But Privacy Camp 2022 is also the occasion to reflect on a decade of digital activism, and to think together about the best ways to advance human rights in the digital age.
The 10th edition of Privacy Camp invites for a forward-looking retrospective on the last decade of digital rights. This edition aims at building on the lessons of the past and at collectively articulating strategic ways forward for the advancement of human rights in the digital society.
Emerging intersections within the realms of regulating digitalisation as well as within other broader social justice movements point that – while some issues remain timeless – the power struggles ahead might happen on new terrain(s).
How can we adapt to these new terrains, while drawing on a decade’s worth of lessons? How can we organise with broader groups of people and other communities? What are the points of reflection we must focus on, to address the wider impact of the digital rights’ fight?
Concretely, we want to explore ideas for (1) putting rights at the centre of digital policies, and (2) bringing marginalised perspectives to the core of digital rights discussions. In this spirit, we call for solution-oriented panel proposals around the following themes:
1. Putting rights at the centre of digital policies
Too often, rights are an after-thought of digital policies. In the past decade we have seen again and again decision-makers decide first, and think about the impact on digital rights later. How can this be changed, to have future policy decisions getting rights right from the start, notably in relation to automated decision-making, the platform economy, data protection and privacy of communications, and the surveillance infrastructure?
Notably, we invite proposals tackling questions such as the below:
What can we learn from national and EU debates around digital rights, that will be relevant for current and upcoming challenges?
At EU level, has there been an evolution in terms of better integration of fundamental rights concerns into policy-making and socio-technical design?
Has the changing role of EU institutions in relation to fundamental rights affected their approach to digital policy? Does it depend on the EU institution?
Halfway through its term, how is the European Commission standing in terms of digital rights and policies?
How do debates about EU digital policies intersect with the power of Big Tech and national states?
How to make sure that rights remain a central priority when legal instruments have been adopted and what is needed is to guarantee their effective enforcement (e.g. GDPR enforcement)?
2. Bringing marginalised perspectives at the core of digital rights discussions
The digital rights agenda was never neutral. It has been shaped over the years by a predominantly reactive approach to digital policy debates. Importantly, it also has its own dynamics dependent on a rather specific set of priorities. This means that some perspectives on digital rights, notably those coming from the point of view of marginalised people and communities, have been themselves marginalised. What are the voices and issues that have been left out, heard less, or simply not amplified enough?
Notably, we invite proposals tackling questions such as the below:
How have digital rights strategies and approaches suffered from a limited perspective in the past?
How can the digital rights community better centre the voices of people disproportionately affected by exploitative digitalisation, such as women, LGBTQI+ communities, racialised communities and people from the global south, people with disabilities, working-class people?
What are the lessons learnt from creating broader coalitions with other actors such as workers’ unions, groups advocating for women rights, LGBTQI+ rights, anti-racism movements, or migrants’ rights defenders?
What can we learn from how marginalised groups have been affected by digitalisation, and what effects have legal frameworks had to counter this disproportionate impact?
How can we make sure that when we put rights at the centre of digital policies the concerns of marginalised people are given the necessary space?
How might the digital rights field incorporate transformative justice and decolonial perspectives into its work?
Deadline for panel proposal submissions: 7 November 2021
Background
The past decade brought the increased digitalisation of all aspects of our life. This process has led to a growing production of data in digital formats, be they personal or non-personal data, data related to content or metadata, and often sensitive data because of their nature or because of how they are processed.
In this context, corporate and government entities have gained unprecedented power. Internet services and digital technologies have developed in often inadequate and insufficient regulatory frameworks. As a result, many have been excluded from the benefits of the digitalisation process.
In the realm of the internet, but also beyond it, our societies have seen the rise and normalisation of government mass surveillance and surveillance capitalism, with Big Tech power grabbing from all areas of public life including public services. Connected to this trend, public and political debates have often been centred around securitisation arguments, and policy-making focused on counter-terrorism measures, and border and migration surveillance.
Against this tide, civil society, along with academia and some policymakers have worked together to curtail the harms of data exploitation and promote regulatory frameworks that put human rights at their centre.
In the past 10 years, Privacy Camp has become a forum that facilitates discussion and debates, and that offers occasion to coordinate and strategize better. It has foregrounded issues concerning EU data protection law, online content regulation and platforms’ power, the confidentiality of communications and the regulation of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), among others.
In 2020 and 2021, the public debate has been dominated by the impact of harmful online content, the rise of biometrics mass surveillance and, once again, the fake dichotomy between rights and security. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted our society’s dependence on digital technologies and on the actors that control them, as well as the role of individuals in facilitating or preventing access to data. It thus pushed legislators to focus on the need to further regulate digitalisation, and even re-ignited their aspirations to achieve a so-called ‘digital sovereignty’, of unclear contours.
The digital rights field composition, organisational practices and methods, however, have often left the people most affected by harmful uses of technologies outside of policy, advocacy or litigation work. This has resulted in siloed approaches to human rights in the digital age, or to overlooking the impact of digital infrastructure on marginalised groups and the planet itself.
With this edition of the Privacy Camp, we want to move beyond empty calls to put ‘the (undefined) human at the centre’ into a genuine taking into account of digital rights.
Submission guidelines:
Indicate a clear objective for your session, i.e. what would be a good outcome for you?
Include a list of a maximum of 4 speakers that could participate in your panel. Ensure you cover academia, civil society and decision–makers’ perspectives. Let us know which speaker(s) has/have already confirmed participation, at least in principle.
Make it as interactive as possible and encourage audience participation.
Support diversity of voices among panelists and strive for multiple perspectives.
Note that the average panel length is 50 minutes.
To submit a proposal, fill in this form by 14 November 2021, 23:59 CEST.
After the deadline, we will review your submissions and will notify you about the outcome of the selection procedure before 29 November. Please note that we might suggest merging panel proposals if they are similar or complement each other.
About Privacy Camp
Privacy Camp is jointly organised by European Digital Rights (EDRi), Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), the Institute for European Studies at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles (IEE at USL-B), and Privacy Salon.
In 2022, Privacy Camp’s Content Committee are: Andreea Belu (EDRi), Gloria González Fuster (LSTS, VUB) and Rocco Bellanova (IEE, USL-B)
Privacy Camp 2022 will take place on 25 January 2022 online.
Participation is free and registrations will open in December 2021.
For inquiries, please contact Andreea Belu at andreea.belu(at)edri(dot)org.
The theme of the 9th edition of Privacy Camp was “Digital rights for change: Reclaiming infrastructures, repairing the future” and included thirteen sessions on a variety of topics. The event was attended by 250 people. If you missed the event or want a reminder of what happened in the session, find the session summaries here.
Digital rights for change: Reclaiming infrastructures, repairing the future.
With almost a decade’s legacy, this year Privacy Camp zooms in on the relations between digitalisation, digital rights and infrastructures. Sessions range in format from panels (speakers addressing the audience) to a more interactive workshop (speakers address + audience engagement experiences).
As promised to many of you, the draft #PrivacyCamp21 schedule is out today. Read below what you can expect from the first online edition of Privacy Camp, taking place this year on 26 January 2021 from 10.00 to 16.05.
Digital rights for change: Reclaiming infrastructures, repairing the future.
With almost a decade’s legacy, this year Privacy Camp zooms in on the relations between digitalisation, digital rights and infrastructures. In response to our call for panels, we have received proposal tackling the subject from a variety of perspectives.
We are proud to present the selection of sessions that combine panel format (speakers addressing the audience) with a more interactive workshop format (speakers address + audience engagement experiences):
Time
Room 1 (Plenary and panels)
Room 2 (Panels)
Room 3 (Workshops)
10:00-11:00
Opening and
STORIES of digital rights activism
11:05-12:00
A new model for consent? Rethinking consent among complex infrastructures and complex explanations
Local perspectives: E-life and e-services during the pandemic
The #ReclaimYourFace campaign: Ban biometric mass surveillance
12:05-13:00
Wiring digital justice: Embedding rights in Internet governance ‘by infrastructure’
Platform Resistance and Data Rights
Cryptowars: The battle for encryption
13:00-14:00
Lunch break
EDPS Civil Society Summit
Lunch break
14:05-15:00
Can restorative justice help us govern online spaces?
Criminalising public spaces under biometric mass surveillance
Teach me how to hurdle: Empowering data subjects beyond the template
15:05-16:00
Algorithmic Impact Assessments
The privatised panopticon: Workers’ surveillance in the digital age
Digital rights for change: Reclaiming infrastructures, repairing the future.
The 9th edition of Privacy Camp (26 January 2021) explores the relations between digitalisation, digital rights and infrastructures.
2020 has highlighted the importance of digital infrastructures. Many facets of our personal and social life rely on these infrastructures – from public health to education, from labour to services, from politics to intimate relations. Although this is not completely new, society has realised that there is a need to design and maintain digital infrastructures to prioritise the public interest – resituating the interests of private actors that so often dominate practice and discourse on the topic.
In this context, digital rights are more important than ever. Privacy and data protection are important tools to question, limit and counter massive data collection and intrusive surveillance technologies. Their impact goes well beyond individual interests. While some promote a ‘data altruism’ that would consist in inviting data subjects to consent to more and more data processing operations, it might be that the real altruism and caring for the other is actually calling for a better use of digital rights. It certainly demands thinking about how these individual rights can serve the interests of the public.
Ever-expanding desires for digitalisation – now also connected to promises of post-Covid-19 recovery – are shaped jointly by government data collection priorities and the objectives of ‘big tech’ companies. Reclaiming infrastructures, and embracing digital rights as a tool for change and justice are, in this light, critical for repairing a dire, and inevitably shared, future.
Public spaces and the environment are privileged territories for investigating the intersections between digitalisation, digital rights and infrastructures. The public space, offline and online, is as such a basic democratic infrastructure. The roll-out of surveillance measures such as automated speech moderation on social media or facial recognition technologies in our streets question whether European local authorities, police forces and private companies mandate the public space under a public interest agenda. The environmental impact is furthermore a crucial dimension of all things digital. The IT sector, broadly defined, accounts for more than 2% of global emissions, which is in the same range as aviation. The negative impact of digitalisation is reflected in the effects of big data collection and storage on energy consumption; in poor repairability of devices linked to unnecessary emissions and e-waste; or in vast carbon emissions resulted from training Artificial Intelligence models.
Moving the conversation towards a solution-oriented vision, questions remain around how digital rights can best contribute to reclaiming infrastructures, and how reclaimed infrastructures sustain democratic practices, for a fair, people-centered, digital future in the EU.
In this vein, we invite panel proposals revolving round the following themes:
1. The transformative power of digital rights 2. The social dimensions of digital infrastructures 3. The preservation of public voice in the public space 4. The environmental impact of digitalisation
Concrete examples of topics include (non-exhaustively):
Examples of using existing rights under EU law to advance a fair society
Actions and negotiations to reclaim digital infrastructures for the public interest
Biometric mass surveillance and resistance methods for the public square
Digital infrastructures of oppression | Digital infrastructures of resistance
Reclaim the means of deliberation and public debate
Submission guidelines:
Indicate a clear objective for your session, i.e. what would be a good outcome for you?
Include a list of maximum 4 speakers that could participate in your panel. Ensure you cover academia, civil society and decision – makers’ perspectives. Let us know which speaker(s) has/have already confirmed participation, at least in principle.
Make it as interactive as possible and encourage audience participation.
Support diversity of voices among panelists and strive for multiple perspectives.
Note that the average panel length is 50 minutes.
Send your proposal (a panel description of max. 400 words and a tentative list of speakers) to privacycamp(at)edri.org by 6 December 2020.
Deadline for panel proposal submissions: 6 December 2020
After the deadline, we will review your submissions and will notify you about the outcome of the selection procedure before 10 December. Please note that we might suggest merging panel proposals if they are similar or complement each other.
Privacy Camp is jointly organised by European Digital Rights (EDRi), Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), the Institute for European Studies at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles (IEE at USL-B), and Privacy Salon.
In 2021, Privacy Camp’s Content Committee are: Andreea Belu (EDRi), Gloria González Fuster (LSTS, VUB) and Rocco Bellanova (IEE, USL-B)
Privacy Camp 2021 will take place on 26 January 2021 online. Participation is free and registrations will open in early December 2020.
For inquiries, please contact Andreea Belu at andreea.belu(at)edri(dot)org.