The Privacy Tax: How tracking and hacking affect disabled people, and what we can do about it
Tux Theatre | Sun 24 Jan 1:30 p.m.–2:15 p.m.
Presented by
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Dawn is a DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer who started out as a freelance developer, and realised that learning about infrastructure and release systems would save time and money for everyone involved.
As well as accidental accessibility advocacy, Dawn is on the organising team for the Melbourne AWS Programming and Tools meetup, and can regularly be found sharing knowledge within the Melbourne cloud infrastructure and DevOps communities.
Outside work, Dawn is an occasional author and kitchen alchemist.
Abstract
Surveillance is everywhere. From CCTV cameras on the streets to cookies that track users around the web as they browse, the vast majority of human activity is monitored in some form. The burden of being watched disproportionately falls on marginalised groups, and people with disabilities are no exception in this regard. If your medical records contain sensitive information that you've discussed with your doctor to get appropriate treatment, information security suddenly becomes far more important to you. And if your only method of communication is connected to the Internet 24/7, and thus vulnerable to hackers, true privacy is a great deal harder to achieve.
In this talk, we'll examine how data-driven systems view disability, and look at how accessible technology can be exploited to reveal information about its users. We'll break down ways that disabled people can - and do - avoid tracking and hacking, and find out why paying a 'privacy tax' isn't always feasible for everyone. Finally, we'll discuss open-source software that's already reducing the impact of surveillance and security risks on people with disabilities, and examine what technologists can do to make the privacy tax less necessary.
Surveillance is everywhere. From CCTV cameras on the streets to cookies that track users around the web as they browse, the vast majority of human activity is monitored in some form. The burden of being watched disproportionately falls on marginalised groups, and people with disabilities are no exception in this regard. If your medical records contain sensitive information that you've discussed with your doctor to get appropriate treatment, information security suddenly becomes far more important to you. And if your only method of communication is connected to the Internet 24/7, and thus vulnerable to hackers, true privacy is a great deal harder to achieve. In this talk, we'll examine how data-driven systems view disability, and look at how accessible technology can be exploited to reveal information about its users. We'll break down ways that disabled people can - and do - avoid tracking and hacking, and find out why paying a 'privacy tax' isn't always feasible for everyone. Finally, we'll discuss open-source software that's already reducing the impact of surveillance and security risks on people with disabilities, and examine what technologists can do to make the privacy tax less necessary.