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Participatory Engagement
Competing Legal Frameworks for Humanity in the Data Driven Age
Elizabeth Renieris, Global Policy Counsel at Evernym and provider professional consultancy at HackyLawyer.com discusses different legal frameworks that apply to digital identity and personal data. This video is intended as background for Elizabeth’s January 17th Day 3 breakout discussion session on this topic.
Session Video - Full Screen
- Direct link to video: https://youtu.be/I5bTs6vbN5M
Session Description
Two competing approaches to our personal data-fueled economy are emerging. The first treats personal data as an asset capable of being transferred, traded, and commoditized through contract law (the “property approach”), while the second treats personal data as an extension of our identity, calling for a personal, non-transferable (i.e. inalienable), intrinsic right in our data (the “rights-based approach”). The pace of technological change is accelerating the urgency of picking an approach or determining whether they can coexist. The topic that I would like to explore is how we can design guiding principles to resolve this tension and pave a realistic path forward.
Materials and links for this session:
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Pre-Reading Material: Do we really want to “sell” ourselves? The risks of a property law paradigm for personal data ownership
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Other suggested reading: Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Thomas Ramge; The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff; The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World by Jennifer E. Rothman
About Elizabeth:
Elizabeth M. Renieris (CIPP/E, CIPP/US) is an entrepreneurial attorney, thought-leader and strategic consultant who is passionate about emerging technologies and their impact on privacy, identity, society, and collective consciousness. She is particularly interested in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning, and the potential of these emerging technologies for social impact.
She presently serves as Global Policy Counsel to Evernym, Inc., an innovative startup focused on building commercial products and services for individuals and enterprises that enable a new paradigm of digital identity known as “self-sovereign identity” (SSI). In her role as Global Policy Counsel, Elizabeth advises Evernym on both foreign and domestic law and policy challenges, particularly as they relate to digital and self-sovereign identity, blockchain and DLT, governance frameworks, and data protection and privacy matters.
Elizabeth is particularly focused on reaching a “new deal on data” that is user-centric, user-controlled, and privacy-enhancing, with specific emphasis on enhancing individual rights. Having a deep interest in and understanding of advanced technologies allows her to act as a kind of “legal engineer” who works in parallel with technical teams to design and build products and services focused on promoting these compliance and policy objectives.
In addition to her role at Evernym, Elizabeth is actively involved in a number of blockchain-related academic initiatives and interest groups, including through active participation in the European Commission’s EU Blockchain Observatory and collaboration with the German Blockchain Association’s Bundesblock, as well as through projects with the MIT Media Lab’s Legal Forum and various Legal Hackers chapters. Elizabeth is also an advisor to several blockchain-related projects, including the CU Ledger initiative focused on credit unions and a supply-chain and trade finance solution called IOUze. She is also a frequent public speaker.
In prior roles, Elizabeth served as a principal at a DC-based boutique blockchain practice and as general counsel at a blockchain-based digital identity startup in San Francisco. She has counseled global technology companies and startups alike on all aspects of privacy and data protection laws, technology transactions, and global regulatory compliance strategies as an attorney with a major US law firm’s blockchain and technology transactions practice group, and as a member of the intellectual property/information technology practice of a major international law firm’s London and Abu Dhabi offices.
A polyglot who has lived and worked in five countries on three continents, Elizabeth has a global perspective on questions of law and policy. Elizabeth holds an A.B. from Harvard College, graduated on the Dean’s List from Vanderbilt Law School, and obtained an LLM from the London School of Economics, where she earned distinction for her dissertation on media and the law.
LINKS
https://twitter.com/hackylawyER