Preparing for better times: Restoring data rights in a post-pandemic world

Both the Covid-19 pandemic, and the world’s response to it, are unprecedented in modern times. As the virus has spread, countries around the world have taken different approaches to flattening the curve. By necessity, governments around the world are having to temporarily suspend certain fundamental rights, including the rights to liberty, freedom of assembly and privacy. What all approaches have in common is the central role that unprecedentedly powerful data-driven digital tools have played in the response.  Restrictions on fundamental rights are largely being planned, monitored and enforced based on insights gleaned from the processing of personal and sensitive personal data - whether aggregated, anonymised, or not. As new necessarily invasive partnerships, methods and approaches to data collection and use are rolled out to combat the pandemic, our instincts are, understandably, focused on the immediate needs at hand. However, as pandemic responses are planned, implemented, reviewed and adapted, it is crucial that we also start to consider how they will eventually be rolled-back. International data governance standards including the OECD’s Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data and Privacy By Design Principles, among many others, as well as human rights standards, all indicate that consideration of how rights - including rights over one’s personal data - should be restored after a crisis should be part of the planning process.  About This Event:The Open Institute and DataReady Limited are pleased to invite you to a virtual workshop to brainstorm and think through the policy and operational steps that need to be considered during Covid-19 response planning on how temporary and intrusive uses of people’s data will eventually be wound down. Our focus is regional in scope and centres on the response in Africa, which is largely still in a planning phase and which will require significant support from international partners in the coming weeks and months. Our objective is to assist policy-makers in their thinking as they plan pandemic response interventions and as such we also call upon representatives of civil society, the United Nations, other development partners, and private sector stakeholders who are often the sources of data, to contribute to this discussion.