Digital Rights

"Algorithmic misogynoir in content moderation practice" from Brandeis Marshall, offers an intersectional perspective by exploring the discrimination specifically faced by Black women in the United States.

"The state of content moderation for the LGBTIQA+ community and the role of the EU Digital Services Act" by researcher Christina Dinar, focuses on the challenges faced by the queer community in Europe and offers detailed recommendations for the forthcoming EU Digital Services Act.

The EU and the US have to navigate bilateral differences and work with like-minded countries to formulate a response to China’s techno-authoritarianism. This effort should go beyond industrial policy towards shaping a positive and inclusive digital agenda.

US President-elect Joe Biden is preparing for a long-overdue national effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus. That may include facilitating and promoting widespread use of smartphone-based tracing apps that have been developed and distributed in a state-by-state patchwork.

As contact-tracing apps prove less useful than hoped in many countries, other digital tools such as wearable fitness trackers are gaining in popularity for detecting or tracing coronavirus infection. But a reliance on such technologies comes with big questions about effectiveness and privacy.

Federal, state, and city governments are working with technology companies to monitor citizens during the pandemic, with no guarantee of what will happen to the data after the crisis passes. The irony is that Brazil already has a law that would protect the right to privacy – but the government is trying to delay its implementation.

Open-source software, transparent communication, and public-private cooperation with both large and small companies—the development of the German contact tracing app could be a model for future government IT projects.

The Indian government faces strong pushback from civil society for mandating the use of a privacy-intrusive COVID-19 tracing app. The heated legal debate resembles the previous one over the country’s controversial biometric ID system Aadhaar.