Human Rights and Digital Technology

When we talk about digital technology, our focus is often prohibitively narrow. Taking a cue from scientific research models, we examine the parts, rather than the whole, inadvertently isolating software from hardware, the technological frameworks from their actual use, or the costs of the digital revolution from its benefits. In their course Human Rights and Digital Technology, Professors Susan Perry and Claudia Roda guide you through the practice of joining two disciplines – law and science – in an attempt to understand more fully the dense, multidimensional nature of their interactions and their impacts on society. Taking a specific example, digital privacy, both professors work with you in the social sciences, whose knowledge of technology is limited to their own user experiences. The curriculum explores a new educational space at the theoretical intersection of human rights and digital technology, while integrating a practical component that allows you to produce educational materials for stakeholder audiences; this merging of theory and practice provides you with the opportunity to reflect on the convergence of law and science. The curriculum was designed to address the salient need for privacy protection education for all sectors of the general public, as well as practitioners, regulators and students in related disciplines. The educational and reference material generated by the project targets the socio-ethical, legal and technical issues that privacy by design raises for these stakeholders across society.