Open Conversations: Privacy Is a Civic Technology (Isabela Fernandes)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 2:33
Privacy is framed as a civic technology: the speaker argues that anonymity underpins democracy, pointing to the anonymous vote, and that treating privacy as something only the guilty need puts democratic institutions at risk. She describes a narrative war over truthful information in which the choice of technology matters, mentions volunteers who map a network every hour, and urges lowering resource and knowledge barriers so people can practise small acts of digital disobedience, such as opening a link in a privacy browser rather than Chrome.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
Transcript
When people ask what is privacy, I normally say privacy is everything that makes you who you are. Like every single element, the things that you like, the thing that you dislike, the things that you're curious about, the things that you want to change. My name is Isabella Fernandez. I'm the exact director of the top project and our mission is to advance human rights with our technology. We are focused on privacy and the ability of people to be anonymous online. I always tend to say when people try to associate anonymity with, oh, you have something to hide. You're probably going to do something illegal. I remind people that anonymity is important pillar of democracy. Your vote is anonymous for a
reason. So, it's very dangerous to make that association, right? Like it's very dangerous to think that privacy does not matter because when you start saying those things you're giving a green light to the dismantle of democracy. We are in a narrative war and this information is not just about moderating content and fake news is also about the lack of truthful information and technology is a key component of who is going to win the war. I think uh more than ever, right, like for the future of the planet, for the future of human rights in general, we need to start thinking about that, thinking about what technology we're using.
We have a group of volunteers calling direct authorities. They are the ones who look around and map the network every hour. So, I think people do want to help. They want to contribute. Sometimes what is impeding them is the resources or just the technical knowledge. So we need to lower those barriers. It is possible to have a different relationship with technology and we are proving and we're showing it. These projects are extremely important for the resistance and this is when I call digital disobedience. It can be the moment that you deny cookies on your browser you doing it. I always say like okay you use this signal that's great but if someone send you a URL on signal
where you gonna open you're gonna open on chrome no you want safe browser to do it so you can open on top brows so that one complements the Thank [Music] you.