To view the video for this webinar, visit our website at yapadvocates.org/digital-privacy.
Last Sunday, March 7, YAPA hosted its first community event of 2021, an informational webinar on data privacy. The webinar featured an expert panel as well as breakout rooms for audience discussion afterwards.
The project to create this webinar was headed by YAPA members Dylan Yang, Elizabeth Lee, with contributions from Maggie Dong and Ishaani Dayal. The idea for the webinar was conceived at YAPA’s winter camp, as the group brainstormed ways to benefit the community and decided that working to increase awareness about data privacy was a meaningful initiative.
“Privacy is a human right, and data privacy is no different, but it's not just about protecting data,” said Dylan Yang, one of the student hosts and moderators of the event. “Too often, people don't even understand what rights they do and do not have.”
Through the information provided by this event, YAPA hopes to help change that.
The event featured speakers Gerhard Eschelbeck, former Vice President of Security and Privacy Engineering at Google, and Ray Wang, founder, Chairman and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley based Constellation Research Inc who has published a best-selling book, Disrupting Digital Business and authors a popular business strategy and technology blog.
Below are major questions raised during the webinar and answered by our panelists. For more detail, feel free to view the webinar video on our website's Digital Privacy community project page.
- Many of us are doing more and more things online — socializing on Facebook, meeting on Zoom, accessing our bank accounts online. Do you think average people should be concerned about the security of their data? What about the risk of these services mismanaging or misusing that data?
- How do the new data privacy laws passed in CA (Prop 24) affect consumers?
- Recently, Facebook settled a lawsuit that claimed it used photo face-tagging and other biometric data without the permission of its users for $650 million. Do you think everyday users should be concerned about cases like this?
- What do you think are some simple ways ordinary consumers can work towards strengthening the security & privacy of their data?
- What are some of the more prominent cyberattacks that have happened in the past? How can people protect themselves?
- What are some steps average people can take beyond things like secure passwords and not sharing personal information to ensure security?
- How has the COVID-19 pandemic and its acceleration of internet adoption shaped the threat landscapes in 2021? What do we need to be prepared to handle them?
Written by Esther Luan