Argentina Hub Report

Dear All,

This is the final report for the Argentinean Hub in Buenos Aires. As I informed before, we have two different ways to communicate the forum to the civil and academic society. Firstly, we organize a live meeting with two more NGO which deals with digital inclusion, and we actively participated in the debate of workshop 66, on the future of privacy. The technical aspect of the transmission went just perfect. We have as well the opportunity to address to the panel a question, related to the RFID technology and privacy, which had a very interesting feedback indeed, because we had two different point of view of the panelist. The question was focused on the necessity of changing the European rules governing privacy when using a RFID technology. The discussion within the speakers ruled about the non necessity of such change, because the UE directives already have privacy principles to be applicable in a technology environment, being the RFID just a new environment that might need to complemented with those principles. However, on the other hand, the other point of view noted that sometimes those principles would not be at first hand applicable to certain cases where the RFID technology would be involved, therefore some new advance in both legal and practical aspect of UE directives should modified in order to adapt its application to this emerging technology. After the IGF transmission, we continue discussing about privacy and consumer’s rights, mostly the challenge for privacy rules to contemplate new situations that new technologies.

The rest of the transmission of the forum was done by a virtual platform provided voluntary by a professor of our University. We did select different workshops to transmit online and at the same time we discussed by chat what was going on, and we address as well a question for one of our online participant to the panel. We have to say that the promotion of the event had a really good acceptance and that academics not only from Argentina but as well from Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador participated from their countries, and discussed about the workshops’ themes.

The participants were mostly interested in three subjects of the forum, namely privacy, social networks, childhood and internet and cybercrime. As hub organizer is was great to have as well the opportunity to chat on line through Webex with a colleague from Brazil, who was really very interested in changing experiences related to the work with childhood they are doing in Brasilia. This was done during W. 140

We discussed on line as well, the challenges with the development of E-government in Latino-America, as well as the new situations that Internet allows to include in Society, such as equality of women and new technologies, e-learning for access to education for developing countries, the spread of new values and safety of environment.

Finally, I want to express that this remote participation was extremely important for access to information and both academic and stakeholders discussion, as well as networking, even online. We are looking forward to continuing this project next year and hoping as well to present remotely one or more speakers to take part in the forum.

Sincerely,

Analía Aspis