Speakers

Ridwan Oloyede is the assistant director for the professional development workflow at Certa Foundation’s Center for Law and Innovation. He most recently co-authored Certa Foundation’s report on the state of AI regulation in Africa and analyzed Rwanda’s unique approach to AI regulation as the first mover in Africa. Previously Ridwan Oloyede co-founded Tech Hive Advisor, PrivacyLensAfrica, and Privacy Bar & Bants. He has been designated as an expert at the Council of Europe’s Data Protection Unit. 

Carlos Affonzo De Souza is director of the Institute of Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro and a professor of law at Rio de Janeiro State University and the University of Ottawa Law School. Carlos De Souza is an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information and Society Project. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Global Network of Internet & Society Research Centers, and his recent work has focused on Brazil’s efforts to regulate AI ahead of November’s G20 meeting and the emerging rights-based approach in that regulation.

Mason Kortz is a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He brings his legal training and background as a software and database developer to his work at the Cyberlaw Clinic. His recent research focuses on the law of artificial intelligence and algorithms, and he has written and presented on how algorithmic decision-making has impacted intellectual property rights, product liability requirements, and the criminal legal system.

Gabriele Mazzini is the architect and lead author of the EU AI Act by the European Commission, where he has focused on technology law and policy for the past seven years. Prior to joining the European Commission, Gabriele served in the European Parliament and the Court of Justice and was Associate General Counsel at the Millennium Villages Project, an international development initiative across several sub-Saharan countries. Gabriele Mazzini is a Connection Science Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In this talk, Dr. Vinton G. Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet,” talks about his concern for privacy in the future. In 2004, he was awarded the Turing Prize, the highest honor available in computer science.

Language: English

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In Germany, cash is the only unrestricted legal tender and still the most commonly used means of payment. Compared with non-cash means of payment, cash is an important corrective in payment transactions. No other non-cash means of payment achieves a similarly high level of inclusion and provides comparable protection of privacy. Nevertheless, the use of non-cash means of payment continues to increase in Germany. Card-based payment methods are of particular importance - either directly with the plastic card (debit or credit card) or with the virtual card via which non-cash payment methods are processed in the background, as is common in mobile payment and Internet payment methods.

BigTechs - large companies with established technology platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon, and Facebook - are now established players in payments. Given the increasing presence and market power of U.S. card providers and BigTechs, as well as the likely growing influence of Chinese BigTechs in payments, the question of how to preserve the European banking industry's ability to act will arise more strongly in the future.

The TAB report provides an overview of developments in payment transactions up to and including February 2021, examining and comparing the specific characteristics of cash and selected non-cash payment solutions as well as payment behavior in Germany, Sweden, and China. The brief study is rounded off by an examination of the changing power structure in payment transactions as a result of the emergence of new players and the reactions of traditional credit institutions and central banks to this.

The TAB report and the accompanying policy brief TAB-Fokus Nr. 37 (both currently only in German) are available online. An English translation of the TAB-Fokus will follow soon.

Artificial intelligence is being increasingly leveraged across industries to offer superior products and services and optimize business processes. The proliferation of AI, however, raises a number of ethical questions on data privacy, fairness, bias, and accountability. In the future, will AI decide who is insured and who is not? Who will get which level of insurance coverage? And will vulnerable groups be left behind uninsured? This talk focuses on the risks related to the use of AI in the insurance sector.

This event is organized by the Department of Strategy and Innovation.

Founded in 2006, ITIF is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute—a think tank. Its mission is to formulate, evaluate, and promote policy solutions that accelerate innovation and boost productivity to spur growth, opportunity, and progress. ITIF’s goal is to provide policymakers around the world with high-quality information, analysis, and recommendations they can trust. To that end, ITIF adheres to a high standard of research integrity with an internal code of ethics grounded in analytical rigor, policy pragmatism, and independence from external direction or bias.

Focus

ITIF focuses on a host of critical issues at the intersection of technological innovation and public policy—including economic issues related to innovation, competitiveness, trade, and globalization; and technology-related issues in the areas of information technology and data, broadband telecommunications, advanced manufacturing, life sciences, agricultural biotechnology, and clean energy. (Read more about ITIF’s policy goals and values.)

Ongoing research programs and educational activities include:

• Setting the policy agenda on technology, innovation, and global competition issues by producing original research reports and analytical commentary;
• Shaping public debate by hosting events, giving speeches and presentations, providing official testimony, publishing op-eds, and serving as expert issue analysts in the news media; and
• Advising policymakers through direct interaction in Washington, D.C., and other state, national, and regional capitals around the world.

On the strength and influence of this work, the University of Pennsylvania has ranked ITIF as the world’s leading think tank for science and technology policy, and one of the top 27 U.S. think tanks overall.

Expertise

ITIF is led by its president and founder, Robert D. Atkinson, an internationally recognized policy scholar and widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “Tech Titan,” and Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “Doers, Dreamers and Drivers of Information Technology.” Under Atkinson, ITIF’s team of policy analysts and fellows includes authors and recognized experts in the fields of economics, tax policy, trade, telecommunications, privacy, cybersecurity, and life sciences, among many others.

ITIF is home to the highly regarded Center for Data Innovation, which develops and promotes policy ideas to capitalize on the tremendous economic and social benefits that data-driven innovation can offer. ITIF also launched—and spearheads—the Global Trade and Innovation Policy Alliance, an international network of think tanks that conduct evidence-based research into policies that can foster greater trade liberalization, curb “innovation mercantilism,” and encourage governments to play proactive roles in spurring innovation and productivity.

Misinformation about COVID-19 has led to severe harms in multiple instances: as an example, a rumor that drinking methanol would cure the virus resulted in hundreds of deaths. While end-to-end encryption is an important privacy safeguard, this encryption prevents platforms such as WhatsApp, Signal, and others from employing centralized interventions and warnings about misinformation. Several options, however, from user interface changes to tip lines to having more intelligence on client devices offer hope.

In this presentation Dr Scott A. Hale will discuss how text similarity algorithms are being used to help fact-checkers locate misinformation, cluster similar misinformation, and identify existing fact-checks in the context of tip lines on platforms with end-to-end encryption. The presentation will detail research at the Oxford Internet Institute and Meedan, a global technology not-for-profit developing open-source tools for fact-checking and translation, that is actively being used by fact-checkers to improve the information available online.

Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires. by Rana Foroohar

Julie E. Cohen is the Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center. She teaches and writes about surveillance, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, information platforms, and the ways that networked information and communication technologies are reshaping legal institutions. She is the author of Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019);Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Association of Internet Researchers Book Award and was shortlisted for the Surveillance & Society Journal’s 2013 Book Prize; and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Peter Söderbaum, (2019), Ecological Economics in relation to a digital world, World Economics Association (WEA) Conferences, No. 1 2019, Going Digital, 15th November to 20th December, 2019

Mit: Dr. Linda Monsees (Autorin, Postdoktorandin am Exzellenzcluster "Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen"), Prof. Peter Burgess (Professor and Chair of Geopolitics of Risk at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris) und Prof. Dr. Nicole Deitelhoff (Direktorin des Leibniz-Instituts Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung, Principal Investigator des Exzellenzclusters "Die Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen", Professorin für Internationale Beziehungen und Theorien globaler Ordnungen der Goethe-Universität)

Kate Klonick is an Assistant Professor of Law at St. John's University Law School and an Affiliate Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and New America. She holds a JD from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Senior Editor at The Georgetown Law Journal and the Founding Editor of the The Georgetown Law Journal Online; and a PhD from Yale Law School where she studied under Jack Balkin, Tom Tyler, and Josh Knobe. Between law school and her time at Yale, she clerked for the Hon. Richard C. Wesley of the Second Circuit and the Hon. Eric N. Vitaliano of the Eastern District of New York.

Kate has a background in cognitive psychology which she applies to the study of emerging issues in law and technology. Specifically, this has included research and work on the Internet's effect on freedom of expression and private platform governance. She writes and works on issues related to online shaming, artificial intelligence, robotics, content moderation, algorithms, privacy, and intellectual property.

Her work on these topics has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Maryland Law Review, New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian and numerous other publications. 

Thomas Kadri is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School, a Resident Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project, and a Mellon Fellow. His research looks at the impact of networked technologies on criminal and tort law, with a particular focus on the constitutional implications of cybersecurity and content moderation on online platforms. He is currently working on an article about how platforms are using anti-hacking laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to police “public” parts of the internet. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Michigan Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, the Maryland Law Review, the New York Times, and Slate. He is also an Adjunct Professor at New York Law School, where he teaches Cybercrime.

In the Global South and particularly under repressive regimes, these frameworks can be imposed with little regard for human rights obligations and without a full understanding of the technologies and processes they regulate or their implications for the preservation of the core values of the internet: interoperability, universality, and free expression and the free flow of information.

This panel brings together practitioners from five international organizations monitoring the development of legislation and case law related to cyberspace to discuss the implications for the future of human rights online.

Panelists

Moderator

Robert Faris is the research director at the Berkman Klein Center where he contributes and provides oversight to research at the center. His research includes the study of digital communication mechanisms by civil society organizations and social movements, and the emergence and impact of digitally-mediated collective action, as well as the influence of networked digital technologies on democracy and governance and the evolving role of new media in political change.

Dr. Hawley Johnson is the Project Manager for Columbia Global Freedom of Expression, an initiative to advance the understanding of international and national norms and institutions that best protect the free flow of information and expression in an interconnected global community. Hawley has over twelve years of experience in international media development both academically and professionally, with a focus on Eastern Europe. She recently worked with the award winning Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project to launch the Investigative Dashboard (ID), a joint effort with Google Ideas offering specialized databases and research tools for journalists in emerging democracies.

Robert Muthuri is currently a Research Fellow – ICT at the Centre for IP and IT (CIPIT) at the Strathmore School of Law. He is a Legal Knowledge Engineer working at the intersection of legal theory and AI. Robert is an Advocate of the High Court of Kenya who, with the conviction that technology had a lot more to offer the legal domain, further pursued a career in legal informatics.

Juan Carlos Lara is a Chilean lawyer, specializing in law and technology, currently working as the manager of the Public Policy and Research team at Derechos Digitales, a non governmental organisation based in Santiago de Chile that promotes and defends digital rights in Latin America. He has worked as a consultant in intellectual property for public and private entities, has been a research assistant at the Centre of Studies in Cyber Law at the University of Chile, and is currently an LL.M. candidate at UC Berkeley. In Derechos Digitales, he leads research and policy analysis on technology and data privacy, equality, freedom of expression, and access to knowledge and human rights in online platforms.

Gayatri Khandhadai is a lawyer with a background in international law and human rights, international and regional human rights mechanisms, research, and advocacy. She previously worked with national and regional human rights groups, focusing on freedom of expression. She coordinated the IMPACT — India, Malaysia, Pakistan Advocacy for Change through Technology — project with the Association for Progressive Communications. Her current focus is on digital rights in Asia with specific emphasis on freedoms of expression, assembly, and association on the Internet.

Jessica Dheere is co-founder of the Beirut–based digital rights research, training, and advocacy organization SMEX (smex.org) and a 2018-19 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She is also incubating director of the recently launched CYRILLA Collaborative (cyrilla.org), a global initiative that maps and analyzes the emergence and evolution of legal frameworks in digitally networked environments through open research, data models, and databases.

This question of whether Facebook gathers information about users who are not signed in or do not have an account was raised in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal by lawmakers in hearings in the United States and in Europe. Discussions, as well as previous fines by Data Protection Authorities about the tracking of non-users, however, often focus on the tracking that happens on websites. Much less is known about the data that the company receives from apps. For these reasons, in this report we raise questions about transparency and use of app data that we consider timely and important.

Facebook routinely tracks users, non-users and logged-out users outside its platform through Facebook Business Tools. App developers share data with Facebook through the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK), a set of software development tools that help developers build apps for a specific operating system. Using the free and open source software tool called "mitmproxy", an interactive HTTPS proxy, Privacy International has analyzed the data that 34 apps on Android, each with an install base from 10 to 500 million, transmit to Facebook through the Facebook SDK.

Current ethical debates about the consequences of automation generally focus on the rights of individuals. However, algorithmic processes – the major component of automated systems – exhibit a collective dimension first and foremost. This can only be addressed partially at the level of individual rights. For this reason, existing ethical and legal criteria are not suitable (or, at least, are inadequate) when considering algorithms generally. They lead to a conceptual blurring with regard to issues such as privacy and discrimination, when information that could potentially be misused to discriminate illegitimately is declared private. Our aim in the present article is, first, to bring a measure of clarity to the debate so that such blurring can be avoided in the future. In addition to this, we discuss ethical criteria for technology which, in the form of universal abstract principles, are to be applied to all societal contexts.

Shoshana Zuboff is a social scientist and author of three books, each of which has been recognised as the definitive signal of a new epoch in technological society. Her latest book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism reveals a world in which technology users are no longer customers but the raw material for an entirely new economic system. Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emerita at Harvard Business School and was a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School from 2014 until 2016.