In November, Dr. Payal Arora will be in Germany for three events, where she will speak about datafication and globalization. The events take place at the University of Bremen, the University of Hamburg, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Dr. Arora is currently a research fellow at the ZeMKI Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research at the University of Bremen. Her public talk on November 14th at the ZEMKI seminar is titled "Benign dataveillance — the new kind of democracy? Examining the emerging datafied governance systems in India and China." This talk critiques novel databased models of governance emerging from the Global South, specifically India and China, enabled by net-based technologies. The first model, the Biometric Identity Scheme or ‘Aadhaar’ project in India consolidates citizens’ digital identities to serve as the prime portal to access all government services such as welfare benefits. R. S. Sharma, the secretary of the Department of Electronics & Information Technology in India declared that, “digital India is not for rich people . . . it is for poor people.” The second model is China’s Social Credit System. By combining the citizens’ financial records, online shopping data, social media behavior and employment history, the system will produce a ‘social credit’ score for each citizen. This rating system will be used to measure the citizens’ trustworthiness. This talk unpacks these value-embedded systems intended to build citizenship through the lens of political participation, inclusion and representation to address what constitutes as democracy in the global and digital age.
Her second public talk at November 14th is at the University of Hamburg, as part of the Ethics in Information Technology Public Lecture Series. The talk is titled “Regulated Data - Regulated Activism? Digital Activism in the GDPR Era.” The summary of her talk is as follows: In a favela ruled by the drug lords in Rio de Janeiro, an activist uses Facebook Live to capture the dealings in his neighborhood, putting himself and some of his community members at risk. In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a few teenage girls instagram the fashions of the week, unveiled, an act that can be persecuted by the morality police. In Jammu and Kashmir, some activists through the hashtag #justiceforkathua draw attention to the case of an eight-year old nomadic girl who was gang raped, defying the privacy law on revealing identities of minors. These are just some of the many cases that shed light on the gray area between privacy and protest. Contrary to seeking to be protected through anonymity as the bulk of the current research alludes to, some of those at the margins may choose to put themselves at high risk by being visible and heard. The GDPR, rooted in the Western ideology of individual choice and rights, may have created a privacy universalism, begging the question of whether privacy is a privilege and a luxury. This talk draws from a decade of fieldwork and activism among vulnerable communities beyond the West to grapple with the question of whether privacy and activism are after all compatible.
Her third public talk will be at the workshop on The Future of Law: Technology, Innovation and Access to Justice at the Humboldt University of Berlin on 28th and 29th of November 2018. The workshop is being organised by the Chair for Public Law and Comparative Law, Humboldt University of Berlin and the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung for Freedom. Her talk will be about Digitilization, Civil Society and Development cooperation. The talk will explore how can technology and data driven strategies be used to improve the functioning of civil society organizations as well as capacity building and rule of law reform and promotion abroad? What implications will empirical techniques, analytics, and innovation have on the broader social sector? What do these changes mean for questions of privacy, security and agency for persons in the global south?