RightsCon Toronto 2018

In a computational world, aggregating scattered digital footprints into personal profiles is both increasingly straightforward and increasingly invasive, threatening to create a by-default architecture of identity that guts anonymity -- a key form of privacy and prerequisite to fearless democratic participation. This dilemma is only becoming more familiar to anyone involved in digital governance. In Canada, courts have recognized that even in the face of serious crime, anonymity is to be preserved until its override has been judicially considered, provided there is a chance to – and yet in more mundane civil matters like copyright enforcement, the same balancing is often averted. In Europe, Cybercrime Convention drafters grapple with whether to fix the cross-border multilateral assistance treaty (MLAT) process, or to replace it with another. In South Korea, the national intelligence service procures the services of foreign hacking teams until it can secure the ability to reach into private communications. And, at the seat of the domain name system that backstops the Internet, the long-running debate on registrant anonymity through domain proxies has taken a definitive turn. This panel seeks to move beyond polarized debates in weighing abstract harms to identify the power of defaults, weight of the privacy interest in anonymity, and importance of procedural safeguards and innovative streamlining in order to ensure its protection when push comes to shove.