Session
The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected countries all around the globe, seriously impacting their economies and challenging them to protect the health of their population while ensuring the continuity of the most important social activities like education, work, access to goods and services. Technologies based in the intensive use of data have been one of the components incorporated by the governments to provide solutions in the context of the pandemic, often deployed to public-private partnerships or services supported by private companies.
Large scale digital transformation (work, education, socialization) was accelerated on a short timeline during the lockdown due to the pandemic and it will continue on to a greater or lesser extent until the pandemic is controlled. This increased digital interaction raises relevant questions on data governance such as data collection, possible misuse, importance of data protection and online safety. We propose exploring in this Main Session on Data on how COVID-19 has influenced the discussion on data governance and practices that have been put to an additional and severe test within the current pandemic.. This session also proposes a critical review of the role that the data driven technologies implemented in the pandemic have played for the protection and promotion of human rights, the lessons that this situation leaves us about their role in the future development of our societies, and on how to promote public and private policies balanced for the greater respect and promotion of the rights of people in emergency situations. Valuable findings, experience and ideas collected in devoted work of BPF on Data and New Technologies will be incorporated into this Main Session preparation and discussion.
The conversations hope to guide the discussions to the following policy question:
- What useful experiences from different stakeholders can we share about how to ensure privacy and other human rights while leveraging the use of data for tackling the pandemic?
- What are the governance challenges and lessons learned during the pandemic about the implementation of data-driven technologies in a diversity of contexts across the world?
- Has COVID-19 made people think about and share data in a different way?
For sparkling this discussion we will have the pleasure to present the following speakers:
- Clayton Hamilton, eHealth and Innovation portfolio of the WHO Regional Office for Europe
- Carmela Troncoso, DP3T Exposure tracking Protocol developer team, Switzerland
- Gonzalo Sosa Barreto from Uruguayan Electronic Government and Information and Knowledge Society Agency (AGESIC), Uruguay
- Robyn Greene, Privacy and Public Policy Manager on Facebook Privacy Policy team, USA
- Dr. Rasha Abdula, Professor, Journalism and Mass Communication at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Egypt
- Amber Sinha, Center for Internet and Society, India
- Moderator: Gabriella Razzano, Research ICT Africa, South Africa