Collateral Damage: Incoming Regulation That Might Kill the Decentralized Web
There's a new impetus among governments to combat the centralized web with laws and regulations. But could these proposals also affect decentralized alternatives? We'll talk about concrete new laws from GDPR to Article 13, incoming drafts, and big picture initiatives, and how they might be tweaked to help, not hinder, the Dweb.
How can developers either comply with those rules or design their systems in line with the underlying goals of protecting privacy and giving users control over their data?
This workshop provides an opportunity for developers who care about the privacy goals underlying the GDPR and other regulations to learn from legal experts, to share information about their systems and how they view compliance, and to hear from builders who are implementing systems under these legal regimes.
Matthew Hodgson is technical co-founder of Matrix.org: a not-for-profit open source project focused on solving the problem of fragmentation in current Chat, VoIP and IoT technologies. By defining a new lightweight pragmatic open standard for federation/interoperability and releasing open source reference implementations, Matrix hopes to create a new ecosystem that makes open real-time-communication as universal and interoperable as email.
Matthew juggles Matrix with the roles of CEO and CTO of New Vector, the company behind Riot.im, the flagship collaboration app built on Matrix. Previously, as a technical lead at MX Telecom (acquired by Amdocs in 2010), Matthew designed & architected Amdocs’ next-generation Video/VoIP client and network infrastructure, and draws on his Internet background to rapidly deliver carrier-grade enhanced communication solutions to network operators. He has specialised in interactive video and telephony applications for over 16 years, including co-founding a digital marketing startup, and contracting roles at Accenture and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. He has a BA in Computer Science and Physics from the University of Cambridge, and has lectured on VoIP at Imperial College London.
Matthew believes in the virtues of open collaboration. We live in an era where we can benefit very easily from cross-industry inputs to foster innovation and we don't make enough out of it. He wants to change the world to give access to communication and privacy to everyone while keeping the user's experience at the heart of every new product and leaving everyone the choice of their provider.
Danny O'Brien is Senior Fellow and DWeb Strategy at the Filecoin Foundation and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web. He has been a tech journalist, developer, and activist for online free speech, privacy, and an open internet for over 20 years, including over a decade at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
His work within the technology sector has included being a founding employee at the Virgin brand's ISP, Virgin Net. As a journalist, he served as Silicon Valley correspondent for the London Sunday Times and the Irish Times, and defended reporters globally from online harassment and cyber-attacks at the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Chris Riley is the Director of Public Policy at Mozilla, working to advance the open internet through public policy analysis and advocacy, strategic planning, coalition building, and community engagement. Prior to joining Mozilla, Chris worked as a program manager at the U.S. Department of State on Internet freedom, a policy counsel with the non-profit public interest organization Free Press, and an attorney-advisor at the Federal Communications Commission. Chris holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He has published scholarship on topics including innovation policy, cognitive framing, graph drawing, and distributed load balancing.
Greg is a lawyer based in Berlin, where he chairs the Privacy and Data Protection subsection of the Blockchain Bundesverband. He is co-founder of the Interplanetary Database Foundation, and the former Chief Policy Officer of ascribe.io and BigchainDB. Before moving to Berlin, Greg spent five years as a litigator with one of Canada’s top class action law firms, where he worked on class actions against Facebook over privacy violations, and Visa and MasteCard alleging price fixing. He served on the Board of Directors of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and authored he BCCLA handbook on laptop and smartphone searches at the Canadian border.