The rise of techno authoritarianism - The use and employment of technology to violate rights

Over the past few years, governments and authoritarian actors all over the world are increasing their reliance on personal and sensitive information under the banner of improving public policies and services. The result is a widespread use of biometric data (including for mandatory identity cards), facial recognition in combination with the monitoring of public spaces, centralized databases of citizens personal data, among others technologies and practices.
Technologies and practices that can pave the way for tech­enabled human rights abuses, one of the main outcomes of a process called tech­authoritarianism. And they also raise concerns about the disproportionate collection and processing of personal data by governments that are not compliant with data protection and privacy frameworks.
The result of which may be health indicators being used to identify and capture groups that deviate from gender or political norms, e.g. LGBTQI people, and the use of other kinds of data to apply some measurement of political censorship or doxxing practices directed at anti­fascist groups. We believe that it's most important for practices of data processing to reinforce human rights­respecting bases regarding personal data as well as pertinent data protection principles, such as data minimisation, purpose limitation, data security, data accuracy, and data relevance.
Our session will, therefore, discuss the practices that characterize techno­authoritarianism, the downsides to the disproportional use of data by governments and in which ways it affects our Democracies. Additionally, we are interested in understanding what are the particular effects of violations and abuses of the right to privacy caused by this event.
Participants: Bruna Santos (Data Privacy Brasil), Javier Pallero (AccessNow), Jhalak Kakkar (Center for Communication Governance), Mahsa Alimardani (Article 19) and Rafael Zanatta (Data Privacy Brasil)