OISTE.ORG to address the 40th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Right to Privacy

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OISTE.ORG to address the 40th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Council on the Right to Privacy

Geneva, 01 March 2019

Foundation OISTE, whose acronym is given by its original name in French: Organisation Internationale pour la Sécurité des Transactions Electroniques, organises a panel during the 40th Session of the Human Rights Council, right after the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy delivers his report to the Council on Friday the 1^st March 2019. OISTE holds special consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the UN (ECOSOC) and is an accredited member of the Non-commercial Users Stakeholders Group (NCSG) of ICANN as part of the Not-for-Profit Operational Concerns (NPOC) constituency.

The panel will dwell on critical issues underlined by the Special Rapporteur: "more than a third of United Nations Member States have no privacy laws at all while most of the other 125 states have laws which cover some of the contexts where privacy may be threatened but not all. Some important threats to privacy especially those arising on the context of national security, intelligence and surveillance are inadequately regulated in most countries of the world" (A/HRC/37/62)

This comes at a moment when the general public starts to realise the reach of "Surveillance Capitalism" in our daily lives.  As pointed out by the Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff. "We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain operations for surveillance capitalism's surplus flows. The result is that the choice mechanisms we have traditionally associated with the private realm are eroded or vitiated." (The Guardian, 20.01.2019)