foreign
floriani
Sam is a digital rights activist and
writer based in Melbourne they are
currently the program leader digital
Rights Watch where they advocate for a
liberatory digital future in which
everyone confront everyone can thrive
they're going to talk to us about human
rights and Tech policy in Australia with
digital rights and digital wrongs please
welcome Sam
[Applause]
hmm
I'd like to start with some stories
so a teenager and her mother discuss
accessing vital Medical Care on a
popular social media platform
now this form of Medical Care is widely
recognized as essential but it's
recently become criminalized
they think that they're having a private
conversation but their messages are not
encrypted
the social media platform hands over
their Communications data to law
enforcement and the teenager goes to
prison and it looks like the mother will
follow
a woman has built her entire Community
online she spent hours weeks months
building up her brand finding her
community making friends she's earning a
living
now she knows that she works in a pretty
stigmatized area so she makes sure that
she's really careful to abide by the
rules of the platform
but they are vague and they do seem to
change all the time
she's got a whole Community there she's
got access to a support network they're
sharing you know crucial health and
safety information together and then in
an instant she loses it all all of her
friends all of her community all of her
pictures her videos her memories it's
all gone and there's no Pathway to
appeal
a man is looking for a home
it's the middle of a housing crisis and
he's really stressed out so he's going
to rental inspections and he's using
whichever app the real estate agent asks
him to
he starts to become a little bit
uncomfortable with the kinds of
questions that they're asking especially
as they become more and more invasive
and they kind of seem irrelevant to his
ability to pay rent
but he doesn't want to be Troublesome or
annoying because he knows that that will
make it all the more hard to secure a
rental
he misses out on securing a home again
and again and again because an
algorithmic scoring system downranked
him and he has no idea why and no way to
do anything about it
a young woman
is living her life given that it's the
modern digital economy she has a mobile
phone
and then one day her telecommunications
provider has a massive data breach
they blame hackers but she later finds
out that maybe their digital security
wasn't quite up to scratch
her details are online and she has no
idea how to protect herself or her
identity
a few weeks later her health insurer
also has a massive data breach more of
her details are online creating an Ever
more complete picture of her and her
life
these companies in the news say things
like oh well we don't know of anybody
who's been harmed as a result of these
breaches and yet she lives her life
every day in fear that her ex-partner
will be able to find out with a little
bit of effort where she lives
so I could fill my entire time slot with
stories like these
and these stories are all connected
they're all digital rights issues
and all of these stories are based on
real events and they have really real
impacts on people's rights safety and
well-being
there are countless examples of ways in
which digital Technologies are
intersecting with systems of Oppression
Injustice and inequality and in many
ways making things worse
conversely digital technology has
immense potential to improve the way
that we live work and connect given that
you're here today I don't think I need
to convince you of the good that
technology can do and it's immense
possibilities
but the risks and possible consequences
when it goes wrong are immense and
that's where digital rights come in
so digital rights are human rights the
only real difference is that they
specifically take digital Technologies
into account
too often when people talk about digital
rights and harms they think about them
in kind of like an abstract sense sort
of ethereal you know we think about it
happening in cyberspace but not in the
real world
but as you've just heard from these
stories that I shared to begin with they
do have real tangible material impacts
on people's lives and as the Divide
between online and offline continues to
collapse digital rights become ever more
important
and so the fight for digital rights at
its core is about protecting people from
these kinds of harms and more
but more than that more than just
protecting people from the bad stuff
it's all about it's also about you know
envisaging and working towards and
ushering in a world where technology is
really a force for social good
So today we're going to delve into the
world of digital riots where Tech
politics and human rights combine
so in this session we're going to do a
little crash course on digital rights to
begin with that I'm going to go through
the digital wrongs and give you a bit of
uh uh um a Roundup of some tech policy
in Australia and then we're going to
finish up with some tips on how you can
get involved if I've done my job well
and you feel so inclined
um before we go much further you
probably want to know a little bit more
about me that's my cat
um she's my biggest fan and I love her
so much my name is Sam as um Daisy said
thank you for your introduction and
thank you so much for pycon and all of
the organizers and volunteers for
putting this on today it's a real honor
to be here and to all of you for coming
along and coming with me on this journey
um I in my day-to-day life have the
privilege of living and working on
unseated lands of the royal wandering
people of the cooler Nations
um and it always was and always will be
Aboriginal land
my background is in politics and data
science and I've worked in privacy
somewhere or another for about 10 years
in the uh in the public sector in the
private sector and now in the
not-for-profit space I also have done uh
stint as the pro program director at
code like a girl which is organization
all about creating Pathways for women
and non-binary people into Tech careers
and advocating for more inclusive gender
representation in the tech industry
and now I'm the program lead at digital
Rights Watch
which is a civil society organization
that exists to defend digital rights and
to protect digital rights in Australia
we do a couple of things that digital
Rights Watch so we advocate for rights
respecting socially Progressive Tech
policy so that means doing things like
writing submissions going to
parliamentary hearings talking with
industry talking with government and
most of that work happens kind of behind
the scenes
uh we also contribute to the public Tech
discourse so things like coming here
today to chat with you about digital
riots or talking to the media or running
events and campaigns and things
and we are working to build the digital
rights movement in Australia so sadly
the digital ads movement in Australia is
pretty small to be honest and it's
filled with like brilliant dedicated
people but it's chronically underfunded
and under-resourced so what we do is we
try to work with different organizations
people across law Tech social justice
other community groups to try and build
that movement because we we know that
we're more powerful together
okay so as I said before digital rights
are human rights as realized in the
digital age
so that's a pretty big concept so I
thought we'd break some of that down
so one aspect of fighting for digital
rights is protecting and upholding human
rights that existed long before the
Advent of the internet so things like
the right to privacy freedom of
expression freedom of speech freedom of
assembly and so on so these things
existed long before the Advent of the
internet
and something to be aware of as we go on
is that Australia doesn't have a federal
Human Rights Act or Charter and we're
the only Western liberal democracy that
doesn't have one and this sadly makes
the fight for digital rights all the
more challenging
now for me the right to privacy is
absolutely pivotal in this fight and
that's because it is what we can call an
enabling right
so privacy is really important in and of
itself but it also enables us to enjoy
other rights and freedoms
for example if you think of any social
movement that's you know pushed back
against powerful institutions for social
change it is incredibly difficult to do
that incredibly hard to organize a
protest or coordinate a union or you
know build a community based on
Resistance if you are if you have no
privacy if you're under constant
surveillance and so privacy enables us
to gather and share and organize outside
of the view of those who might want to
be listening in
it's also tied to Notions of
self-determination personal agency
dignity autonomy the ability to develop
one's self sense of self and personality
it's also closely linked to ideas of
anonymity which is really important to
keep lots of people safe online
especially in a digital ecosystem where
it's increasingly possible to track
everything that we do
so these are all really powerful
Concepts and they're really important to
us as individuals but also collectively
as a community and more broadly for
Society at Large
so another aspect of fighting for
digital rights is to fight for the
establishment and protection of newer
rights or reimagine rights that are fit
for the digital age
for instance many now argue that access
to the internet should be considered a
right
and given that so much of our Lives
happens online and you know accessing
Services work socializing it makes sense
that this shouldn't necessarily be
considered a luxury anymore and this is
connected to the idea of digital
inclusion and the digital divide and
just shy of 10 of Australians are still
greatly excluded from the digital
economy
digital security is another thing that
people are starting to consider in terms
of a right
now all of these things are actually
really connected and before I came here
as I was you know working away on my
talk I was like how can I possibly
communicate to these people just how you
know sort of connected all of these
things are and it got it got pretty
um
hectic in my brain to be honest and
where we're going is going to look a
little bit like this so I apologize in
advance it's uh I promise I'm not going
to Pedal like a conspiracy theory
anything
so this is my mind map it's a map of my
mind it's what keeps me up at night I
have nightmares about this it haunts me
um and there are probably infinite ways
that we could create a map like this so
you know if you've got your binoculars
out and you want to pull me up on
something don't at me it's it's just one
example and the idea is to demonstrate
how these things are connected
so in the blue nodes we've got uh rights
not all of them I can't fit them all on
this screen
so you can see the right to privacy
right to protest yada yada
in the purple we have Concepts so ideas
like surveillance capitalism
which is the idea of data extraction and
accumulation for profit
and you can see that that is connected
to datification which is the idea that
everything that we do these days is able
to be transformed into data and that's
connected to data positivism which is an
ideology that basically reports that we
can solve any complex social problem if
we just have enough information enough
data and spaced on this assumption that
everything in the world is knowable and
measurable and therefore predictable
this ideology is actually really popular
in in Silicon Valley for example the
ex-ceo of Google once said that they
could solve practically any complex
social problem with just enough data and
the ability to Crunch it
so this is connected to the idea of
techno solutionism which is a word to
describe the phenomenon where we you
know really try to solve complex social
problems by throwing technology at it
and try or attempt is sort of a key word
there because in a lot of instances it
actually makes things worse
and that's not to say that Tech and data
can't play a really important role in
addressing critical social problems but
it is to say that when we are too quick
to jump to it without considering the
social and political consequences and
contexts then it can end up just
creating more problems
so data positivism create combined with
datification creates this environment
that incentivizes and justifies
collecting more and more data including
personal information and this fantasy of
data positivism establishes this kind of
moral mandate for ever more intrusive
data collection and invasion of privacy
it's Justified as a way to solve these
social problems
and so what we end up with is this kind
of cognitive dissonance where you have
you know some companies operating under
a very clear surveillance capitalism
business model but at the same time
spouting rhetoric about how they're
helping people
now perhaps
um you're really interested in the the
climate the climate the environment the
world that we live in perhaps you want
to see climate action now that might not
automatically you know make be really
easily identifiable how that connects to
digital rights but it does so if we
think about
the right to protest and political
organizing
so climate protesters are some of the
most heavily criminalized activists in
Australia
so for climate activists or any
activists really they need to be able to
do their work by communicating securely
and privately and safely with each other
through encrypted services
activists and protests also are often
needing to be really aware of State
surveillance and through things like
facial recognition technology or other
biometric surveillance
it was only last year that the New South
Wales police
imposed bail conditions that prohibited
climate activists from being able to use
encrypted services like WhatsApp or
signal
so all of this sits within a broader war
and encryption and a rise of the use of
facial surveillance Technologies and I
think it's worth pointing out how this
Canon does have flow on effects a
thriving and functioning democracy
relies on our ability to hold those in
power accountable and again that's very
hard to do if you don't have any privacy
or you're under constant surveillance
but we'll get to more on that shortly
this is also a good moment I think to
acknowledge that safeguarding encryption
and resisting facial surveillance is
important for everyone and benefits
everyone you don't need to be doing
anything even remotely sus to benefit
from this
in fact framing it is something that
only benefits people who have something
to hide is actually really problematic
and damaging
everybody deserves
to digital security and privacy and to
be able to go about their day-to-day
lives safely and securely even if it's
just you know using signal to chat to
your dad
that being said a short word on
criminality in a moment I'm going to
talk about surveillance powers and
something to keep in mind is that these
are often Justified around ideas of
criminality you'll hear people say
things like oh what does it matter
though they're just going to use these
powers on criminals it'll never impact
us
but I think it's important to note that
laws can change and so too can the
notion of criminality
so here in Australia we've seen that
directed specifically towards climate
activists in the last 18 months
in the US we've witnessed how access to
pregnancy termination Healthcare became
criminalized really quickly
in many places around the world simply
being part of the lgbtq community is
enough
we also can't ignore the racial and
classist elements when it comes to
considering what's criminal and what's
not who deserves to be under
surveillance and who doesn't
and so I would strongly suggest that we
exercise real caution when we think
about what when it is or is not
appropriate to use invasive Technologies
for surveillance and to justify it in
those terms
so maybe climate activism isn't really a
bag
let's use one more example before we get
out of this nightmare mind map
so perhaps you have kids or you know
kids or you just care about the safety
and well-being of children and young
people
and maybe you've heard about algorithmic
rabbit holes maybe you saw a Four
Corners episode on it
so we can go down here into this this
section of our math
and so often in discussions about Online
safety we really focus in on these
rabbit holes and to be fair there are
that there are a real problem they do
send people down to some really really
awful areas of the internet
but often the logic goes basically well
okay well I don't want this I don't want
children to see this content and so we
need to get rid of that content
but this only really considers part of
the issue what we end up doing when we
when we focus too much on policing and
removal of content is that we end up
playing this kind of game of
whack-a-mole and it often overlooks a
lot of the complexities that come with
content moderation and especially
automated content moderation
and it can also Overlook some of the
harms that can arise when it goes wrong
for example by disproportionately
removing imagery of people in larger
bodies or gender diverse people
or by taking down documentation of Human
Rights abuses
and of course on the other end when
content doesn't get taken down that also
causes harm so it's a really sort of
you're walking on a knife's edge it's
really hard to get right but that
doesn't stop politicians from you know
spouting things like well why can't we
just use AI to get rid of all of the bad
stuff
and it's because it doesn't work that
way humans are complex and context is
really important
so we also need to go up in the other
direction and consider the engagement
and recommendation algorithms and when
we start thinking about that we start
thinking about the attention economy
which is predicated on targeted
advertising which takes us right back to
surveillance capitalism
now that's certainly an
oversimplification of all of the issues
happening here but what I think is
important to note is that if we spend
too much time thinking just about the
sort of symptoms and dealing with it on
that level we miss out on dealing with
the underlying causes the business
models the incentives and so we just end
up sort of you know having the same
issues over and over again
so the point of showing you this mind
map wasn't to like lead you to apathy or
despair be like oh my God this is just
so much stuff happening possibly rather
I'm hoping that what you can take away
from this is two things firstly that all
of these issues are kind of start to
become connected and not always in ways
that are immediately obvious including
connected with other social causes or
issues and the second thing is that
there's no need to tackle all of this at
once so if you're interested in a
particular social cause or a particular
issue or a particular technology then
you can kind of pick that spot and focus
on that and it will play a role in the
larger digital rights ecosystem
okay so now we come to the digital
wrongs section of this talk where I tell
you about just a handful of tech policy
uh legis and legislation in Australia
that weren't not great
so there's heaps of things we could talk
about uh in this but I picked out three
key areas that I think are really
important to understand the sort of
context and a bit of History so you know
where we're at now where we've come from
and where we're going next
so first things first privacy reform
my true love and arch nemesis
so protecting privacy as I said is about
so much more than just keeping our
information secret or to ourselves it's
about addressing individual and
Collective power imbalances and
information asymmetries it's about
reining in corporate dominance and it's
about upholding democracy and safety
so in Australia the main bit of
legislation that governs how our
personal information is collected used
and shared is the Privacy Act
so this was drafted in 1988 based on a
set of oecd principles and aside from a
few amendments here and there it hasn't
really been significantly changed since
then
the ACT is designed to be
principles-based and Technology neutral
but even then a lot has changed since
the 80s and so it's just woefully
ill-equipped to deal with the modern
challenges of the digital economy
so Advocates and experts have been
calling for reform to the Privacy Act
for a very long time and here you can
see a very simplified timeline of of the
process of privacy reform and you can
see that there's just been so many
rounds of consultation and yet no real
change yet no real improvements to to um
that we need to better protect people
and their personal information
key things that we're fighting for just
so you have a sense of what's on the
table is
these things so updating the definition
of personal information and this might
not sound super sexy but it actually has
the potential to be really powerful and
that's because the definition of
personal information kind of acts as a
gatekeeper to the Protections in the act
so if we expand the definition we expand
the protections so we needed to better
include things like technical
information like metadata as well as
inferred or generated information which
is becoming you know increasingly more
of an issue we also need it to include
instances where you can distinguish a
person from a group without necessarily
knowing their name but you can
point them out in the crowd and that's
because privacy harms can happen even if
you don't necessarily know the person's
name
there's also currently political party
and small business exemptions in the
Privacy Act which create a huge gap in
the protections it offers
we also need to create a direct right of
action or a statutory taught for serious
invasions of privacy and that would
enable people to take their right to
privacy in their own hands and take
action when it gets violated or if it
gets violated
and lastly a fair and reasonable test to
put the onus of responsibility onto
organizations you know organizations
that collect and handle our personal
information should be bearing the brunt
of making sure that they're doing so
fairly and responsibly
currently we operate under more of a
model that places the responsibility
onto individuals to manage our own
privacy through things like privacy
policies and really long terms of
service and clicking I agree and
clicking I accept and collection notices
and all of that all that stuff that you
know we hate to read and barely ever do
and it doesn't work and it's
manipulative and so we need to shift the
responsibility back onto organizations
so the next issue is surveillance Powers
so over the past decade we've seen huge
increases in electronic surveillance
powers in Australia which have really
wide reaching impacts on privacy and
digital security and the functioning of
our democracy uh more broadly again I've
put together a little timeline here to
visualize what's been going on and
generally speaking these powers are
Justified as necessary for national
security purposes they use quite scary
rhetoric about terrorism and CR and
crimes as I mentioned before
and in Australia we have this pretty
well established tradition that once for
repressive powers are introduced they
are really rarely wound back for example
just following uh the September 11
attacks Australia passed just shy of 100
National Security laws which had many
had uh unprecedented rights infringing
powers
and over 20 years later only one of
those significant Powers has been
repealed
and since then three major pieces of
legislation have been passed which are
highly controversial and detrimental to
digital rights in Australia
the first is the metadata retention
scheme which you may remember it was
established in 2015 and basically set it
up so that Telco providers have to
retain certain forms of data for two
years metadata
again this was passed on to Grand
assurances that would only be used for
the most terrifying criminals
fast forward to 2016 and over 60
agencies applied to access metadata
including local councils to follow up on
fines
jump ahead again to 2021 and the
Ombudsman found that every single agency
that they investigated every one of them
had accessed Australians metadata
without proper authorization
and jump ahead to this year and it was
reported that metadata was used to check
up on the relationship status of people
receiving welfare an incredibly punitive
use of these powers and not exactly the
terrifying criminals that we were sold
this law on
then in 2018 we had the assistance and
access act or Tola or the anti-scription
ACT
um because you might remember uh old
mate turnable so this was super
controversial and the debate was really
ferocious and it really had Echoes of
the crypto Wars in it and basically what
it did is enable law enforcement and
intelligence agencies to compel tech
companies to assist them to be able to
access the content of encrypted
Communications
it was rushed through the Christmas
period and labor said that they had
concerns about it
but they passed it anyway
so in 2020 a an independent monitor
reviewed the act and and suggested major
overhaul which still hasn't happened
today politicians and others are still
using the same rhetorical tools to try
to argue against encryption although the
emphasis has shifted away from terrorism
now and towards people who disseminate
child sexual abuse material or csam but
what these politicians and other people
in power fail to realize or fail to
address is that strong encryption
encryption helps keeps all of us safe
including children and weakening it in
any way actually undermines that safety
for all of us in the long term
and then the last one identify and
disrupt act so this passed in 2021 and
it introduced a range of new powers that
enable law enforcement intelligence
agencies to add copy delete and alter
data on devices take over accounts and
lock people out and and to access entire
networks with minimal oversight or
accountability
now before it passed the Parliamentary
joint committee on intelligence and
security noted that there were serious
flaws in the bill and recommended
significant changes including narrowing
the powers and establishing oversight
mechanisms
but did they listen to that no they
passed it just under a week later
so important thing to remember with all
of this is that private and public
surveillance is functionally intertwined
and what I mean by that is that
government use of surveillance relies
upon commercial data collection at the
data market and private tech companies
you know be it through Telco providers a
commercial facial recognition Services
databases digital platforms Etc it's all
really connected
onto Online safety so around the end of
2020 the Australian government started
to really get a taste for taking on big
Tech you might remember at the time
there was a lot of stories about Scott
Morrison cracking down on social media
and alongside this there was a lot of
talk about protecting women and children
as well and so we ended up with the
Online safety act
now this was surrounded with a huge
amount of debate and controversy
so the bill is complex we don't need to
get into the weeds of it here but there
are some things in it that are really
valuable and reasonable but there are
also a range of really broad vaguely
defined powers given to the regulator
the e-safety commissioner to be able to
require the removal of certain content
so this applies to things to Illegal
content like csam or proterra material
material but it also extends to other
categories of content like sexual
material
and this is where it starts getting
really tricky and starts getting wrapped
up in sort of conservative ideology and
has real implications for the freedom of
speech and freedom of expression for
many groups
what's more is that in able to be able
to put these things into action a lot of
it incentivizes or requires increased
policing monitoring and data collection
online which usually means increased
surveillance
so in addition to digital rights
Advocates there was serious pushback
from sex worker groups and the lgbtq
community because these groups are
already subject to disproportionate
censorship and surveillance online and
the ACT stood to increase that
fast forward and there's a whole range
of things happening in the Online safety
space at the moment so we've got you
know proposals for age verification that
come with huge privacy and digital
security risks also a kind of
implementation nightmare
we've also got proposals to reduce
anonymity online and this as I said
earlier risks the safety of a lot of
people who rely on anonymity to be able
to be online in a safe way
we also have these increasingly complex
requirements for tech companies
including the basic Online safety
expectations as well as the Online
safety industry codes so at the moment
we're waiting for the e-safety
commissioner to deliver a couple of
standards and we're expecting that those
standards will include requirements for
proactive detection or client-side
scanning which is a really controversial
and quite a dangerous use of technology
to sidestep encryption
so the Online safety space is a complex
regulatory spiders web and most of the
time it ends up being a kind of tug of
war between big Tech and the government
and small tech companies or
organizations are really starting to
feel huge amounts of pressure to be able
to meet the requirements that are really
designed with big Tech in mind
for example in 2022 sweater a sex worker
friendly uh social media platform had to
shut down in response to increasingly
hostile regulation
now things like this make many
communities less safe but it also
contributes to the consolidation and
power of power and influence into a
handful of large companies because
they're the only ones who are able to
meet the requirements
now none of that is to say that tech
companies should be off the hook when it
comes to Online safety but it is to say
that we need to be thinking really
carefully about the kinds of regulations
that we put in place and we need really
we need a technologically competent
government who meaningfully engages with
the tech community and the digital
rights Civil Society space and other
impacted communities
it is really concerning when the vision
for Online safety in Australia is one of
increased automated content moderation
privacy invasive age verification a
reduction in anonymity and a Crackdown
on end-to-end encryption these
approaches increase surveillance the
increase control and monitoring and in
doing so threatened to actually
undermine the safety for a lot of people
I also think it's important that we
recognize that all of this sits within a
broader context of anti-sax anti-queer
and anti-trans sentiment that is both
online and offline much of the public
discourse from politicians and others in
of in positions of power have emphasized
a view of Online safety that centers
upon moralism puritanism and sanitizing
online space
it becomes genuinely very scary when the
idea of offensive content or harmful
content is your very existence
especially when it starts to impact the
internet which you know many of my
fellow lgbtq community members rely upon
to access support friends and vital
health information
we must vehemently reject the notion
that the safety of children is in
opposition to the freedom and safety of
queer people and sex workers because
it's not true and it's a dichotomy that
is designed to divide us and lead us to
punitive and harmful internet regulation
thank you
so I picked out the the three key areas
that I think are really important to
focus on but I also wanted to just flag
a few things that are coming up now that
you've got all of all the context you
know what to keep your eye out for um as
we move forward so at the moment we've
got misinformation and disinformation
legislation on the cards which is
creating some controversy around when it
is and isn't misinformation and what to
take down and what not because it's very
complex
we've got digital identity on the cards
which includes use of biometric data and
we've also there's been a lot of talk
about AI governance recently so they we
just currently there's a inquiry
happening at the moment about different
mechanisms for regulation and and
governments of AI so you can expect to
see a lot more of that in the near
future
okay so my hope is that this talk has
helped bring you up to speed on some of
the current digital rights issues and
the state of tech policy in Australia
and even better I really hope that at
least one thing has resonated with you
and maybe moved you to get involved with
the digital rights movement in Australia
technologists and Tech workers like
yourself are in such a wonderful
position to get involved with this
movement as people who understand and
actively work in Tech you have a lot of
power to help others understand and to
influence the direction of Technology
so here's a little list of things you
can do if you want to get involved not
all of these will apply some will work
some will some won't so take what fits
and ignore what doesn't
so firstly educating and helping to
demystify technology so
as I said you're in a great position to
be able to do this there's a lot of
misunderstanding of a lot of
Technologies and how they work and how
they impact people for example I'm sure
I'm sure a lot of you have seen
firsthand a lot of the misinformation a
lot of the misunderstanding around how
large language models work and what they
are and are not capable of and this kind
of confusion leads people to
misunderstand what AI can and can't do
and that can end up having real impacts
on the decisions and policy making
directions so playing a role in
demystifying how these Technologies work
for the people around you who who don't
necessarily have your level of
understanding can be really helpful
you could speak up within the industry
so you have the potential to be a really
influential voice within the tech
industry in Australia so this might mean
things like advocating internally in
your workplace or just with your Tech
Community for rights respecting
practices privacy digital security the
inclusive design and things like that
um submission writing so not this isn't
for everybody but if you're interested
we could really use the help
um so one of the main challenges that we
find with um doing submission writing
and engaging with the government on Tech
legislation is it's just a phenomenal
lack of technical understanding it seems
in our government and often they'll put
forward proposals that don't really make
sense or uh sort of technically
um inappropriate or lead to technical
consequences that they haven't foreseen
or really hard to implement and things
like that so if you're inclined weighing
in on those kinds of things is really
really helpful
if you're somebody who builds products
perhaps you could play an active role in
prioritizing digital rights in the
design development and deployment of
them this might mean being again a
champion for privacy it might mean
engaging with inclusive design
methodologies you could advocate for
features that Empower your users to
control their data and to make informed
choices about how they interact with it
if you're doing side projects you could
consider maybe volunteering some of your
technical expertise to organizations
that are doing good or you could
contribute to digital rights focused or
open source projects
this is the spicy One tech unionization
um some tech workers overseas have
started uh exploring unionization as a
way to collectively negotiate for better
working practices for themselves but
also as a way to negotiate for a seat at
the table to be to pay it to play a part
in the decision-making processes so they
want to be able to use this to not only
impact the company that they work for
but also Society at large and how they
sort of fit together
so sadly we don't have a dedicated Tech
Workers Union in Australia yet
but
I mean what if you started one
it's just food for thought or you could
just work with your your fellow
colleagues and your friends but
I don't know think about it
and lastly supporting digital rights
organizations as I mentioned right at
the beginning the digital rights
community and movement in Australia
is wildly under-resourced and as you
have just heard there is just a
phenomenal amount of work in different
areas coming at us from all angles all
the time
so advocacy work might not be your cup
of tea and that's totally fine not
everybody needs to do it but please
don't underestimate how much of a
difference it can make by supporting
people who are doing that work
so this could look like a few different
things you could
um make a donation you could make a
one-off donation which is good you could
make a recurring donation which is even
better it helps us to plan ahead
you could organize something in your
company to do your recurring support or
of course it you could also get in touch
with the organizations and see if you
can help out in other ways maybe it will
be helping with some some technical
projects maybe it would be writing
content or helping to run workshops and
things like that it really depends on
the organization obviously I hope that
you will support digital Rights Watch
but there are some other organizations
in Australia that are doing really great
work as well including electronic
Frontiers Australia the Australian
privacy foundation and they're a
state-based civil civil liberties
organizations as well which you can look
up if you're interested
okay so that brings us to the end thank
you so much for your attention and again
to pycon for having me I hope that I
have left you with some little Sparks of
ideas of things that you might be
interested in following up and that
hopefully you'll want to get involved in
the digital rights movement in Australia
um thank you again
[Applause]
[Music]
do I am I am I am I alive now can you
hear me yay lovely thank you so much Sam
we have uh the traditional sponsor uh
sponsored speaker gift of a mug and a
thank you card thank you thank you so
much thank you
[Applause]