Lizzie is a human rights lawyer specialising in public interest litigation. Lizzie has local and international experience in a wide array of court jurisdictions, and is passionate about equality before the law and that the rule of law should be protected, particularly given the incursions on civil liberties that have become a staple part of the war on terror. In 2019, Lizzie received the Human Rights Hero Award for her work campaigning against Australia’s encryption laws.
Most people are aware that websites and online services collect data about them in order to serve them with targeted advertising. They may also know that physical stores use ‘rewards’ programs such as loyalty cards to link purchases and serve consumers with targeted discounts and sale offers.
More and more people talk about big data and algorithms to do all sorts of things. What are these concepts and what do they tell us about the world we live in?
A wide variety of services, products and platforms are available free of charge online. They range from almost ubiquitous services such as Google to game apps like Pokémon Go, to highly specialised niche apps like Carr Matey (which will tell you where you parked your car, but in a pirate voice).
Much of the content we share on the web, such as articles, pictures and videos, is subject to copyright law. That means that the right to use, share or modify the creative work belongs to the author. The Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) gives authors copyright over literary, dramatic, musical or artistic ideas automatically. The author can also sell this right to someone else, like a film studio or a record label. If someone uses the work without permission from the author of the person who holds the rights (often called the ‘rights-holder’) over the work, that person may be in breach of copyright.
Encryption puts information into a secret code so that only those with the correct ‘key’ can read it. If you send an encrypted message to a friend, as it travels to its destination, the message will be unreadable to the networks that control the wires of the internet. Only when your friend decrypts that message with her key will it become readable again, which often happens in an instant. In the context of digital information, such as on your computer and mobile phone, encryption protects important information like your internet banking details, credit card numbers and passwords from being stolen. Encryption is also important to protect your privacy on the web, and stop your personal information or messages from being eavesdropped on.
We are living in a data saturated world, which presents a range of challenges and exciting possibilities for human rights lawyers and activists. The age of computers, the internet, and smart phones has created an unprecedented number of information sensing devices, generating lots of data about their users. Examples of such data include shopping habits, individual location and movements, political opinions, internet searches, friend networks, social media use, and even health information.