What went down at #PrivacyCamp21?

EDRi’s annual flagship event Privacy Camp took place yesterday, on 26 January, for the first time online. We hope many of you were able to attend and that you found the event just as inspirational as the in-person experience.

#PrivacyCamp21 brought together 245 academics, activists and privacy experts and explored the relations between digitalisation, digital rights and infrastructures.

2020 has highlighted the importance of digital infrastructures. Many facets of our personal and social life rely on these infrastructures – from public health to education, from labour to services, from politics to intimate relations. Although this is not completely new, society has realised that there is a need to design and maintain digital infrastructures to prioritise the public interest – resituating the interests of private actors that so often dominate practice and discourse on the topic. In this context, digital rights are more important than ever. Privacy and data protection are important tools to question, limit and counter massive data collection and intrusive surveillance technologies. Their impact goes well beyond individual interests.

During the event we discussed a new model for consent for the processing of personal data in the age of AI and big data. We took a bird’s-eye view on Big Tech’s expansion of power into public services areas at the EDPS Civil society Summit. We heard about threats to encryption, explored the restorative justice model principles to content moderation, and heard about worrying trends of workers surveillance, among others. With a total of 13 sessions including a storytelling session from digital rights activists and several hands on workshops, the 2021 event was hailed a success.

#PrivacyCamp21 in numbers

A total of 510 participants registered to the event. The event counted 1 facilitator, 13 moderators and 54 speakers. We suspect that an approximate of 140 liters of coffee and tea were consumed during the day. On Twitter, the #PrivacyCamp21 hashtag was used in 134 tweets with an approximate reach of 724K people.

We would like to thank our co-organisers VUB, Privacy Salon and the Institute for European studies as well as our supporting organisations epic.org, centr, European Data Protection Supervisor, Mysterium network, Mozilla and Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference (CPDP). We are very grateful to all the session organisers, moderators, speakers and the audience, for making Privacy Camp 2021 a success.

Coming up

Stay tuned for some exciting content to follow:

– Access to the eye opening documentary Coded Bias (for #PrivacyCamp21 registered participants)

– An event summary of with each session’s take-aways

– Graphic visualisation of the highlights of several sessions

Keen to be the first to hear about #PrivacyCamp22? Sign up to our mailing list.

Want to make the next event a bigger success? Donate to Privacy Camp.

We look forward to meeting you in person at the next edition.