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Written by
US Team
23rd September, 2024

Four “immensely influential women” challenge Surveillance Capitalism

5Rights Trustees Professor Shoshana Zuboff and Baroness Beeban Kidron joined Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa and European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager to engage with the widespread collection and commodification of data, the implications this has on our rights and how this needs to change. The event, titled “A Dialogue with the World: Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization”, was co-hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy and the HKS Institute of Politics.

From left: Margrethe Vestager, Baroness Beeban Kidron, Maria Ressa, and Shoshana Zuboff. They are sat on a stage. There is a large US flag to the left, behind Margrethe Vestager. The backdrop is a pale blue with the logo and text 'Harvard Kennedy School: Institute of Politics'.

“It’s not too late” to stop the exploitation of personal data, but this “cannot be done without systemic responses,” said VP Vestager, who has shepherded key legislation for corporate responsibility through to enforcement in the European Union. Thanks to the language for and understanding of how personal information is being used commercially provided by Professor Zuboff, and the pioneering work being done for children by legislators such as Baroness Kidron, it is something that “can be navigated”, said Vestager.

The speakers, introduced as four “immensely influential women” who have been fighting to reform for-profit information collection and exploitation, agreed that a bold, comprehensive and systemic approach is needed. “We need a bolder legislative approach… we need lawmakers to imagine the world that we want to live in and work out how technology is going to help us live in this world, not try to mitigate a couple of harms on the top of the cake,” said Baroness Kidron. And then the rules must be routinely and ruthlessly applied to the digital world.

Looking forward, “we are never going to have AI for the public good…as long as this oligopoly owns and operates the entire market structure of artificial intelligence,” said Professor Zuboff. We must, she concluded, “invent the new structures, and with it, we invent the rights and the laws and the institutions that will keep it all safe in a world of democratic governance.”

At 5Rights, we echo the sentiments shared on stage. It is not too late to reclaim innovation to protect and empower the rights of children and everyone online.

For more information, you can read the Harvard Magazine’s article or watch the full conversation online.