Babette Ngene, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Governments around the globe are increasingly pushing laws and technologies that restrict privacy, anonymity, and access online. Despite being presented as safety measures, they will serve as tools to monitor, control, and exclude people from digital spaces.
At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ensuring that technology serves human rights rather than undermines them is the core of what we do. Our Public Interest Technology team complements our legal and activism arms to bring technical solutions and rigor to the fight.
But public interest technology is not limited to advocacy organizations. One academic security researcher's audit might help expose abuses, thereby holding powerful institutions accountable. Another independent technologist's evidence-based analysis can help in evaluating and advocating policy proposals, directing the future of technology.
In this talk, I will examine the trends shaping the next decade of digital rights, how EFF is responding today, and why building a stronger alliance among advocates, researchers, and technologists may be one of our most important defenses against the erosion of fundamental freedoms online. We will look at these trends in the contexts of age verification, encryption, reproductive justice, and the principles and approaches that technologists uniquely contribute to the fight for digital rights.
Babette Ngene is the Director of the Public Interest Technology team at EFF. She provides strategic oversight for EFF's technological initiatives, ranging from cybersecurity to the development and deployment of open-source technologies dedicated to safeguarding and defending rights in the digital space.
