Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

Executive Summary
The Dataverse
A constellation of issues connects technology and human rights. Primary among them is
the phenomenon of data ubiquity. New and cheap techniques for the collection, storage,
analysis and deployment of data have proliferated in recent decades and impinge upon
our lives in myriad and varied ways. Surveillance, by both public and private entities
plays a large role in this, but ordinary people too now habitually generate reams of data
about themselves, often discarding it into the ether without a thought. Today we are
all “data subjects”, to use a term from the EU’s Data Protection Directive. The ICHRP
Discussion Paper refers to this new contemporary reality as the dataverse.
Surveillance and other data-gathering technologies are also rapidly extending across
borders. Certain technologies, such as satellite image-collection, are fundamentally
global in nature and scope. But all transmitted data electronically, whether via the
internet (email or social networking or otherwise) or through land and mobile telephony,
is prone to collection in numerous places other than the jurisdiction of the data subject’s
location. Interference with communications is infinitely easier than it was with harder
forms of communication, and replication and storage leave no trace.
Moreover, both public and private bodies have become data harvesters. While state
surveillance or email hacking can involve collecting data on individuals across the
world, major data-based firms, such as Facebook or Google likewise harvest data from
individuals everywhere and store these on large centralised servers, usually based in
the United States. As a result, data protections in law, and relevant human rights, even if
they are adequate at national level, are rarely equipped for the transnational context in
which data storage takes place. The borders of the dataverse are inherently porous.
Data protections in law, and relevant human rights, even if they are adequate
at national level, are rarely equipped for the transnational context in which
data storage takes place.
The ICHRP Discussion Paper locates informational asymmetry as a key problem. Vast
quantities of information are held in various centres – again, both public and private –
which gather, store and process them to a variety of ends. In the main, data subjects are
uninformed on the degree to which information exists on them and the purposes to which
it is put. The rise of informational asymmetry as a general condition of communication
and interaction in the world today is undoubtedly a source of anxiety for individuals.
Beyond this, however, it is a source of possible injustice. It nevertheless appears as a
potentially constitutive and ineradicable element of current social arrangements.
The Changing Context of Privacy
The principal human right engaged by this set of phenomena is undoubtedly the
right to privacy, but it is equally clear that this “right”, at least in current formulations,
does not itself capture the full range of concerns generated by current developments.
Navigating the Dataverse therefore undertakes a two-pronged approach to the subject:
re-examining the scope of privacy and its relation to law more broadly, on one hand, and
exploring the relevance of other human rights to this topic, on the other.
Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology, Human Rights