Finding ways to address the burgeoning problems with technology requires imagination and involvement from many sectors. Whilst there is significant regulatory movement from governments to tackle tech monopolies and associated issues, the state of the art moves fast and we see social harms emerge faster than law or design can effectively act.

With such resource behind them, tech companies themselves are extremely adept in deploying high-impact products and then orchestrating the legal, PR, design, and lobbying strands required to keep those products running and insulated from external intervention.

So we see civil society efforts such as the Real Facebook Oversight Board set up by independent experts to publicly adjudicate on problematic content on the platform since Facebook took so long to set up its own version. This shows how bold, creative collaboration is necessary to strive for preferable, pro-social outcomes. At the least it's part of the puzzle.

Interdisciplinary civic tech

In the spirit of interdisciplinary approaches, openDemocracy has been working with TrustLaw on the yourData project to explore possible legal bases for data transparency on the web. Today I join a panel at the PILnet forum for pro-bono law to discuss Contemporary Issues in Digital Rights and Privacy to discuss related questions.

"Data has become the world’s most valuable commodity, and the rapid rise of unregulated technology has ushered in new forms of discrimination, challenging traditional notions of privacy and ownership. The panelists will discuss priority actions to ensure data rights, and particularly data privacy, are upheld in the future. The discussion will focus on practical activities that require additional support to scale or start in an impactful way."

Alongside representatives of an Access Now project to find legal frameworks for Covid-19 track and trace apps, we will consider how the data rights landscape looks and what we can do to improve things.

I will argue that civil society actors and others need to keep finding ways to link up, research and communicate solutions to our technology predicaments.

Please comment below with your own ideas about how we can develop such collaboration and get in touch if you would like to support the yourData project in some way.