Hello from York, Maine.
This has been a difficult week here in the U.S. — the shootings of Jacob Blake in Wisconsin and Trayford Pellerin in Louisiana have further amplified the social injustice in this country.
As we saw with George Floyd’s death, a movement similar to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s has been sparked with people standing up and demanding change. This week, the NBA and WNBA held wildcat strikes to protest Blake’s shooting, and some MLB and NHL teams followed suit shortly thereafter. Today, The New York Times reported the NBA and players' union reached an agreement to use league arenas as polling places to ensure playoff games will resume this weekend.
Words are powerful, but even more so when backed by action. Those actions don't have to be big; it can include anything from reading the works of Black authors to voting. If you are looking for suggestions for authors, Jelani Cobb and Ibram X. Kendi are excellent. As a family, we've held ongoing conversations with the kids about race and social injustice since they were small. They're old enough now that they can research on their own, and they've discovered the graphic novel series about the life of John Lewis. It might be the only thing they've agreed on all summer.
On the privacy front, the IAPP's Christelle Kamaliza recently wrote about the role of data in the fight for social justice. "Data and social justice have always intersected, one feeding the other, and not always for the better," she writes. "Rooting out the race, class, gender and other 'isms' in our society requires more than a legal or technological solution. It requires a paradigm shift in education and mindset in how we define ourselves within this global community and a realization that progress at the expense of others is no progress at all."
In the ongoing conversation throughout the country on the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement, Pittsburgh is the latest city to announce it is considering "legislation that would ban police use of facial-recognition software and predictive policing technology." Last year, San Francisco was the first U.S. city to ban the use of such technology by law enforcement.
And the "Schrems II" decision may have been handed down last month, but the resulting conversations are ongoing with EU data protection authorities providing guidance. In the U.S., Charlene Goldfield and Siddharth Sonkar make the case, in an article below, that the U.S. should revamp the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act. "A carefully thought-out model ... could potentially harmonize the need for a sufficiently high privacy standard," they write. "The CLOUD Act model could potentially become a good framework to promote mutual privacy safeguards; clear definitions and agreed-upon terms that span across each country." It will be interesting to see how these suggestions play out in the coming months.