MyData community gathers in Helsinki for rebuilding trust in human-centered data economy – follow online Data is one of the most valuable commodities of the digital era. While the economic potential of a new digital playground triggered optimism among the few that entered the game timely, concerns have been raised in many areas. “Who, how, to what extent, and for what purpose use my data?” are the questions that get limited responses, especially by economic operators that make major profits in this field. In the fourth year after Cambridge Analytica stole data from more than 80 million Facebook users, we are still struggling to apprehend what actually happened with the data, who were the victims, and what was the impact of this famous information disorder. While there appears a general feeling that something is wrong, we are still not able to precisely describe what, and there is even less knowledge on how to fix it. While risks and damage from accelerated development are more and more visible, the dependence of the modern economy on digital data processing does not allow any radical cuts in this field. Therefore, applicable solutions need to preserve operability of the existing infrastructure, while introducing new modalities that will “fix the bug”. One of the key issues in data economy is how to preserve ethics and integrity of data management, while assuring free and fair accessibility and interoperability of the available data.
With this background, in the next three days during the MyData 2019 conference Helsinki is.receiving about 1000 participants to develop the privacy compliant human-centric data economy approach in line with Finnish EU presidency program statement.
MyData 2019 conference aims to accelerate global change towards a human-centric approach to personal data. On 25-27 September 2019, some 1000 experts from business, legal, tech and society sectors are gathering for the fourth time in Helsinki, with the focus on how to effect the change kicked off by Cambridge Analytica type of revelations and the EU driver GDPR process. In times of ever-increasing use and misuse of personal data and micro-targeting, the conference brings people together to develop “human-centric ways of doing things with that data”. Common ground is sought under “transparent, trustworthy and actionable solutions” with the aim to attend “more sustainable and prosperous digital society”.
The conference can be seen as the contribution of the Finnish EU presidency on more “human -centered data economy” while it precedes the expected taking into office of the new European Commission with strong emphasis to steer European approach to regain power at digital era with the whole arsenal of EU level competences including regulatory and competition tools and empowered by pioneering EU work on GDPR. Consequently the NGO driven core 2-days conference is preceded with Commission Next Generation internet driven approach.
Next to long-term privacy activist and professionals the conference includes many acclaimed invited presenters like
- The Grammy-awarded musician Imogen Heap,
- Carole Cadwalladr, the investigative journalist behind the Cambridge Analytica scandal featuring Facebook and Brexit,
- James Farrar, the man who sued and _won _Uber on workers’ rights,
- Digital Minister of Taiwan Audrey Tang,
- Vice-President of the European Investment Bank Alexander Stubb,
- Representatives from Microsoft, European Commission, UNICEF, _IEEE… And many more. In fact, over 120 speakers.
The My Data 2019 conference’s goal is to get about 50% of attendees to come from businesses (2018: 36-42%) addressing the need to shift activism towards sustainable business model to scale up.
For Faktabaari followers the 2 most interesting pics might be the high-profile mediatic “How to rebuild the trust in the era of scandals, data breaches and data misuse.” panel preceded by The Great Hack documentary screening with Carole Cadwalladr, journalist for the Guardian Observer behind the Cambridge Analytica investigation,****Cecilia Álvarez****, who is the EMEA Privacy Policy Director at Facebook**, **Jessica Aro, Finnish investigative journalist from the national broadcasting company YLE, she began to investigate pro-Russian Internet trolls, but became a victim of their activities herself and Paul-Olivier Dahaye, a board member of MyData Global and founder of Personaldata.io focusing on making data protection rights useful. Paul and Carole appear in The Great Hackdocumentary. Some close links to Faktabaari EDU internet literacy project to teachers can be expected also from e.g. “Algorhytm and data literacy” and many other sessions. Faktabaari follows the conference both from the angle of 1) what an individual can do and 2) building an awareness angle including what we know and don’t know of the claimed “broken internet” closely linked to data privacy breaches. Stay tuned.
Link to webstreams and later recordings: https://mydata2019.org/ & ow.ly/kNWq50wq23S
Conference hastag is #MyData2019
Faktabaari and Fairpress.eu co-operate in covering the conference.
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