Warning! You Are Being Watched.

The explosive growth of technology in recent years has given governments, intelligence agencies and big businesses, like Google and Facebook, monitoring tools to create a new empire of Big Brother. People have never been more scrutinised at any other time in human history than they are today. This naturally begs the question: does the right to privacy still exist? 

On 3-4 April, Webster University in Geneva held its fifth annual Media Trends Conference, focusing on “Media and Privacy Invasion” to explore a variety of current privacy issues related to the media.

The event included panels on governments, media and public interest, whistleblowing or terrorism, cybercrime and cybersecurity, media invasion of privacy, businesses and commercial interests, global regulatory developments, latest tools for technical surveillance, and emerging privacy issues. It also involved four workshops, led by students and professionals, aimed at promoting debate and discussion on where the line should be drawn to prevent unwarranted intrusion of personal privacy.

During the sessions, speakers continually highlighted the importance of raising awareness in society about the dangers of technological developments and how harmful they can be for privacy interests. It is essential, they said, that people realise that once public, personal, or even confidential information hit the Web, it can be accessible worldwide.

Given that Big Brother – either under a corporate logo or a national security symbol – is becoming more and more pervasive, regardless of what is at stake for users, most of the panellists advocated for a new global media regulatory framework. This should be drawn from the users’ perspective in the hope of achieving a fair balance between benefits of information use and necessary restrictions on information collection, they said.

“Neither nation-state nor corporate interests should decisively form a viable future global media regulatory system from this perspective, but the public interest should,” Anthony Löwstedt, a junior research professor at Webster University in Vienna, said in the event programme.

Others were more sceptical, such as Milos Maricic, head of Web projects at the International Committee of the Red Cross, who was quoted in the programme as saying: “Public discussion on information gathering measures is long overdue, indeed, it may be too late to rein in the machine. Should the media instead be preparing citizens for a future of total surveillance?”

Further information about the event can be found on the Webster University website here.

Joséphine De Ruyck is an intern at Intellectual Property Watch. She is currently finishing an LLM degree in intellectual property rights and ICT law at University of Leuven in Belgium. She holds a Master’s Degree in Law with honors from University of Louvain and an LLM degree from Queen Mary University of London. She has a strong interest in several intellectual property issues, especially access to health, climate change and actual challenges faced by copyright law.