For my Capstone Project, I want to explore Big Data and data collection. I'm looking to address how with the growth of Big Tech, consumers are forced to give away their information in return for abstraction. Furthermore, I want to look into how the abundant collection of information by Big Data leads to private corporations and governments infringing upon human rights.
My Capstone
Essay
My Capstone essay is a culmination of the research I conducted throughout the first semester of my senior year. The essay demonstrates how the internet has become a popular medium for human rights violation, what preventative measures have been taken, and an appropriate course of action to be taken at the international level.
If you would like to access my essay, click here.
This constant connection also opens doors for human rights violations such as the invasion of privacy, suppression of free speech, and surveillance. While regulations regarding technology have remained unchanged, technology has increasingly become more integrated into society. The increase in technological profundity coupled with the inadequate regulations allows private corporations and governments to become more powerful, as users lose ownership of their privacy, their voices, and their thoughts.
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Workshop
For Watkinson's annual Equity and Social Justice Day, I hosted a workshop titled "Redefining 'privacy' in the Information Age'. Over the course of a month, I, along with two other student presenters, worked closely with a faculty coach to prepare this workshop. The session covered how the right to privacy is constantly infringed due to the lack of revision to current legislation and how the recent weaponizing of data has proved this reality to be dangerous.
We used the Cambridge Analytica scandal and practices of the Chinese government to highlight the dangers of data collection. We also used the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, Article XII of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and the EU General Data Protection Regulation as examples to legislation that can potentially be used to regulate tech giants.
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Before the workshop, many students expressed that they felt that their data was safe in the hand of tech giants or that they didn't think that they have any important data stored online; however, the attitude of many of these individuals shifted towards the end as they understood how their own data could potentially be used against them.
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The full slideshow of the workshop can be found below.
For more info on the EU GDPR, click here.
A clip of my segment of the workshop.