The Minnesota chapter of the Cloud Security Alliance held an excellent webinar on January 28, entitled "Digital Rights and the Cloud," with guest speaker Brittany Kaiser, an advocate for privacy rights and co-founder of the Own Your Data Foundation. You can watch the replay here.

Ms. Kaiser was one of the whistleblowers who revealed how the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested the data of 87 million Facebook users, without their consent, before the 2016 U.S. elections. While you might expect from her an activist, anti-corporate stance, she is very pragmatic in her recommendations. She advocates a scheme where people’s ownership of their data is recognized, protected, and the owners can make fully conscious decisions to sell specific data, earning a “digital dividend.” For example, you could allow the city where you live to record your location in order to monitor traffic speeds, or allow researchers to remotely collect vital signs in order to participate in paid medicine trials. People may earn a couple dollars a day, which is negligible in our “first world” societies, but could make a difference for people in other parts of the world.

She is also taking a nuanced view of the need for laws and regulations, wanting them to be narrowly focused on privacy violations that are deliberate or the result of grossly negligent.

The Q&A session inevitably (given recent events) touched on the right to anonymity on social media. Kaiser thinks that anonymity can be useful and acceptable, but protection should end when someone violates the law.