It’s everyone’s responsibility to protect our digital human rights
Governments, companies and citizens need to work together to solve the challenges facing the tech industry, writes Zone’s Sophie Bliss…
Having spent three days at Web Summit in Lisbon, I have been struck by the overwhelming feeling of the tech world wanting to do good. As individuals and businesses we are the generation that needs to turn the tide, whether that’s switching to a reusable water bottle or inventing the electric car. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that consumers won’t accept companies unless they do their part.
But we knew this already. The striking thing for me is how the tech industry is facing challenges such as fake news, data and privacy, censorship of the web and connecting the other 50%, and how we move forwards with the innovations needed to make our world a better place.
I was, perhaps naively, expecting the big thought leaders in tech, politics and beyond (Tim Berners-Lee, Margrethe Vestager etc) to wow us with their approaches and ideas. Instead, there was a rallying call to start-ups, entrepreneurs and innovators to work together to help solve these challenges. The same theme rang out throughout the summit — governments, companies and consumers/citizens all need to work in unison.
Ana Brnabić, the prime minister of Serbia, focused on education, specifically around ‘fake news’. We need to ensure that people use their brains when looking at content online. But how? As David Pemsel, CEO of the Guardian Media Group said, human behaviour will not change — people will always want to click on the most interesting title, the eye-catching image or the outrageous quote; education alone will not make the societal change to stop that. Likewise, Facebook banning all untrusted sources from news feeds is not democratic or realistic and neither is it realistic for governments to make it illegal to share incorrect information online.
We need to:
· teach children how to think analytically, not what to think
· create a technical solution which rewards trusted journalistic sources on social media and the web
· enforce the necessary legislation that incentivises good and trusted content
· ensure companies have the moral integrity to act responsibly
This may seem obvious, but it is clear we have very little idea how to make it happen — exactly how do we train children how to think about digital content? What is the tech solution? What legislation is needed and how do we enforce it? How do we make companies take responsibility?
This is also true of all the other challenges facing tech/digital. We know we need to ensure that the current framework of universal human rights is maintained on and offline, but it’s not clear how do we do that. For example, there are moral questions around AI, machine learning, data collection and the digital economy we need to consider.
A brilliant panel made up of Brett Solomon (Access Now), Peggy Hicks (UN Office for Human Rights) and Adrian Lovett (World Wide Web Foundation) all agreed we have done the legwork in terms of human rights. Now we need to bridge the gap between the framework in place and principles within the digital space.
Traditionally human rights is a matter between the citizen and the state, but in today’s world companies can play an active part and in some cases can be more influential than governments — just look at Facebook.
The private sector has no training or background in human rights and few legal guidelines to go by. The panel recommended that the people in the room and at the summit “act like human beings as well as developers or agencies” and ensure that human rights is ingrained in ways of working and always accounted for in digital.
It’s harder than it sounds. For example, companies may feel that to best serve their consumers they need as much information on them as possible; the consumer may think differently. It’s a tricky balancing act, and where GDPR is concerned many companies are just following the rules and not necessarily thinking about it in these broader terms.
With so many objectives left unanswered, the main takeaway is that we need to tackle these issues in a real and tangible way; not just write new declarations and well-meaning documents. Only by working together can we make tech the force for good that it needs to be.
