Human Rights by Design

Good essay: “Advancing Human-Rights-By-Design In The Dual-Use Technology Industry,” by Jonathon Penney, Sarah McKune, Lex Gill, and Ronald J. Deibert:

But businesses can do far more than these basic measures. They could adopt a “human-rights-by-design” principle whereby they commit to designing tools, technologies, and services to respect human rights by default, rather than permit abuse or exploitation as part of their business model. The “privacy-by-design” concept has gained currency today thanks in part to the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires it. The overarching principle is that companies must design products and services with the default assumption that they protect privacy, data, and information of data subjects. A similar human-rights-by-design paradigm, for example, would prevent filtering companies from designing their technology with features that enable large-scale, indiscriminate, or inherently disproportionate censorship capabilities­ — like the Netsweeper feature that allows an ISP to block entire country top level domains (TLDs). DPI devices and systems could be configured to protect against the ability of operators to inject spyware in network traffic or redirect users to malicious code rather than facilitate it. And algorithms incorporated into the design of communications and storage platforms could account for human rights considerations in addition to business objectives. Companies could also join multi-stakeholder efforts like the Global Network Initiative (GNI), through which technology companies (including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo) have taken the first step toward principles like transparency, privacy, and freedom of expression, as well as to self-reporting requirements and independent compliance assessments.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Schneier on Security authored by Bruce Schneier. Read the original post at: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/12/human_rights_by.html