The Humane Tech Privacy Awareness Project

[aschrijver]

The Humane Technology forum is full of topics and posts that highlight several aspects of Privacy, like privacy infringements in new software releases, how your personal information is used, what is collected, and how you can protect yourself.

This privacy implications of new trends in technology are usually first understood to people working in technical (IT) realms, and they are also most aware of these, and able to defend themselves.

But it is very important that this awareness reaches the broader public. Too many people are still saying "I have nothing to hide, I am okay with data collection, and have nothing to worry about.". But if you would ask these people to provide you their passwords, their worst habits, unvarnished political opinion, their medical and financial records, their deepest secrets, they will not provide that to a stranger. So why do they give this information away for free to unknown commercial entities that want to profit from it?

Privacy is on a gliding scale. We are losing more and more of it every day. If this is not stopped we will eventually end up in a very dystopic society, where the freedoms we currently enjoy have been lost.

We urgently need to raise awareness among the wider public about the importance of protecting your privacy, and make privacy-protection actionable not just for techies, but for lay people as well.

This idea is for starting a project under the umbrella of The Center for Humane Technology that has these objectives in mind.

The Humane Tech Privacy Awareness Project

The goal of this project is to create a website on a sub-domain of humanetech.com (maybe at privacy.humanetech.com that allows visitors to progressively drill-down in privacy-related topics, to:

• Inform themselves (raise awareness)
• Protect themselves (take action)

The website targets 3 audiences and makes clear distinction per topic who is targeted:

1. The general public (primary audience)
2. Tech-savvy people (advanced topics)
3. Businesses (whose decisions impact the first 2 target groups)

The information model of the website should be carefully thought out, so information stays accessible as the amount of content continues to grow. There are many ways to do this, and lots of topics to cover. Some examples of what could be included:

• Listings of popular software and their privacy impact
• Privacy improvement checklists and lists of alternative software
• Provide insights on surveillance capitalism and government surveillance
• Insight on laws and regulations that already exist to protect you, and upcoming changes to them
• Good quality external resources (many exist already, don't reinvent the wheel)
• Information packages you can use to raise awareness with others and 'spread the word'
• etcetera...

The website should be crowdsourced, because only with many people involved can we keep up to what is happening in the realm of privacy protection. Therefore this idea needs to be modeled as a project (on Github).