The OISTE Foundation, a non-governmental organization, in special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC), will lead a panel on the human right to privacy during the 43rd Session of the Human Rights Council (March 3, 2020, at 14:00 — 15:00, in room XXVII) at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

Privacy is as a basic, fundamental human right. It is also an endangered right. New digital technologies track and scrutinize us all at this age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2018). The digital economy considers every click, search or like as an asset to be monetized. Our lives, reflected in cyberspace, are plundered for behavioral data for the sake of a system that converts our freedom into profit. We are quietly being domesticated into accepting as normal that decision rights vanish before we even know that there is a decision to make.

“Never has there been a more important time in our history for business, government, academic and religious leaders to align on the core tenants of humanity,” states Carlos Moreira, co-author of The transHuman Code. “In the absence of a ‘global governor of technology’ — an individual or body that decides what technology is used, when and where — the developers, enablers and users of technology (that’s all of us) must assume the responsibility to program our future.”

“The web is blind; the web has no morals; the web is like fire: it can warm your hands but burn down your house,” Moreira said. In order to build a virtual space that behooves humanity, “we must put humans in the center of the architecture,” he added. That architecture today does not always allow for the free-flowing democratic exchange of ideas but is instead governed by purveyors of code; it’s a realm where internet users have become commodities, and, he said, it’s worth asking, who’s supervising the coder?

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/02/25/1989661/0/en/OISTE-ORG-to-Address-the-43rd-Session-of-the-United-Nations-Human-Rights-Council-on-the-Right-to-Privacy.html