Empowering Digital Citizens
ONLINE CONSUMERS DESERVE CONTROL OVER THEIR OWN PERSONAL DATAWe are an international group of researchers, policy experts, civil society advocates, Internet technical and security experts and business people dedicated to ensuring that the rules of the digital economy are more directed to the broad interests of humans, not just businesses and governments.
A brief video overview of how online users’ data is being bought and sold in a shadowy marketplace where users have no voice, nor ability to profit. And, an exploration of the fix.
Human-centred Digital Governance
Governance That Serves People
A key difference between GIDE and other efforts seeking to influence Digital Governance is our Unit of Measure. Most take an institutional approach. We focus on the outcome on humans.
Many researchers and competition bodies take market participants as their main unit of attention. Other non-profits take the power relationship between nation states as their focus. Most economists focus on issues of inefficiency and inequality within a market framework. Even consumer organisations take the material benefits to consumers as their unit of analysis. But our focus is on the human – not just consumers but also those who are still not users.
Importantly we see humans as more than mere units of economic consumption and production. The last two centuries of capitalism have taught us that social solidarity, personal agency, environmental sustainability, as well as material gain, are each important and separate contributors to human flourishing.
Human-centred Digital Governance
Our Priorities
Committed to advocating practical solutions to pivotal policy makers, the GIDE community is addressing three key areas:
Promoting humane markets to empowering users as real consumers and countering the negative impacts of surveillance capitalism. The misalignment between digital consumers and those who collect and monetize their data has led to a wide variety of serious problems. Over three years, GIDE members have developed an economic analysis and concrete proposals that aim to shift digital economy policies away from massive surveillance and data aggregation, towards a regime that empowers all users as market participants with the market power and the access to skills to approve who access their data and on what terms. The full report, ‘Empowering Digital Citizens’, and related materials are here.
Developing a new narrative for Internet Governance. Recently, some actors have promoted a critique of the original narrative of the multistakeholder model of Internet governance as being one which just serves the interests of Silicon Valley. Members of GIDE are working on a new bottom-up narrative which reinforces how the Internet technical coordination benefits average people in developing economies.
Exploring the future of citizens’ digital rights. Led by its Latin American members, GIDE is commencing a process to consider how the needs of citizens should be best expressed in countries which have rights-based constitutions.
inclusive, transparent and collective INTERNET Governance
The Global Initiative members
Our members represent 24 countries & cover the following areas of data governance:
Classification Models for Personal Data
Technical Digital Architecture
Personal Data Business Systems
Consumer Protection
Management of the Data Commons
Containment of Pandemics
Impacts on Innovation in the Economy
Digital Trade
Competition Policy
Taxation of Digital Goods & Services
Geopolitics of Technology
Privacy
Impact on Emerging Concepts of Digital Citizenship
Hate Speech & Misinformation
Impact on Human Rights
Cybersecurity
Means to Enable Collective Representation of Personal Data Interests
