Crossing Digital Borders: Data Protection Threats & Surveillance of Refugees & Migrants

While asylum seekers are required to provide significant amounts of personal information on their journey to safety, they are rarely fully informed of their data rights by UN agencies, border control, NGOs, and law enforcement staff tasked with obtaining and processing their personal information. In the US, asylum seekers at the border face a number of surveillance threats both from governments and from sophisticated commercial actors who sell data and analytics to the US government. We'll unpack the challenges faced by refugees and asylum seekers crossing these borders, emerging human rights issues in digital surveillance, as well as legal and policy responses by civil society.

Speaker: Dragana Kaurin, Research Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. She graduated from the Human Rights Studies MA program at Columbia University in 2012.
Moderator: Dr. Lara J. Nettelfield, Senior Lecturer, Institute for the Study of Human Rights