Internet Censorship, Surveillance, and Corporate Transparency
Read full details of the event was published on the website of Center for Global Communication Studies.
Since mid 2010 Google has been publishing data about the requests it receives from governments to remove content or hand over user data. This regularly updated Transparency Report reveals alarming trends: Government surveillance is on the rise, everywhere. Even worse, a large number of government censorship and surveillance requests are of dubious legality even according to the host countries’ own laws. In a world where citizens increasingly rely on digital products and services owned and operated by private corporations for their civic and political lives, the implications for human rights and democracy around the world are troubling.
Dorothy Chou, Senior Policy Analyst who leads Google's efforts to increase transparency about how it responds to government censorship and surveillance demands, will discuss Google's Transparency Report with Rebecca MacKinnon, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and an international panel of experts:
- Ronald Lemos, the Director of the Center for Technology and Society at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) School of Law in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Hu Yong, Associate Professor, Peking University School of Journalism and Communication
- Malavika Jayaram, Fellow, Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore and Annenberg CGCS;
- Gregory Asmolov, PhD Candidate, London School of Economics; Global Voices "RuNet Echo" contributor and Russian social media expert.
This event is part of the cross-disciplinary, university-wide “New Technologies, Human Rights, and Transparency” project funded by the university’s Global Engagement Fund and hosted by Annenberg’s Center for Global Communications Studies in partnership with Wharton, PennLaw, Engineering, and the School of Arts and Sciences. The project aims to examine the relationship between government and corporate power in today’s digitally networked world, bringing together research partners from across the university and around the world to develop a methodology to evaluate and compare the policies and practices of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) companies as they affect Internet users’ freedom expression and privacy in a human rights context.
