Viraj Desai (IT for Change) represented the Global Digital Justice Forum at the Global Digital Compact’s “Deep Dive on Data Protection” on 24 April 2023.

1. How a collaborative effort among governments, data protection authorities, private companies, the scientific community, and civil society could be orchestrated to ensure the responsible processing, secure storage, and vigilant protection of personal data, safeguarding it against potential misuse?
2. How to formulate guiding principles that would underpin the creation of high-quality, interoperable data systems to foster a digital trade and economic landscape that ensures no one is left behind.
3. How tools such as (pseudo)anonymization, encryption, and portability can be effectively leveraged.

IT for Change’s input highlighted how the misuses of data for algorithmic sorting processes and group profiling are not simply mitigated by pseudonymization and consent-taking. Highlighting the need to prioritize the sovereign right of peoples and communities to own, control and generate value from their own data resources, the input suggests any useful data protection policy must institute a binding multilateral governance framework to prevent the erosion of our collective autonomy over data, and curtail market tendencies for exploitation and monopolization.

To learn more about the intervention, read it in full.