The Reclaim Your Face movement is a broad coalition of digital rights, human rights and social justice organisatons campaigning to tackle one of the biggest issues in the European Artificial Intelligence world: biometrics. From facial recognition to typing pattern analysis to smell recognition (yes, really!), the coalition demands that all uses of biometrics be: genuinely transparent and accountable; limited in law to prevent harmful uses like mass surveillance; used in full respect for human rights and human dignity.
In this open discussion, we invite anyone that is keen to know more to join us to learn what our work is all about, why it matters, and how you can get involved. We also invite you to give us your ideas, tell us what matters to you, and to co-shape ideas and activities that will make the Reclaim Your Face campaign even more effective!
As the first part of the discussion will be us briefly sharing our work, this will work with any number of participants. For the next (main) part where we want to listen, learn, collaborate and explore, we will need to be flexible and play it by ear for how to manage participant numbers. I am an experienced facilitator so I am comfortable adjusting how we manage this so that if we have a small group, we encourage everyone to share, reflect and join in the discussion, and if we have a larger group, a few people can share their ideas, and others can still be involved by adding their thoughts in the chat or on a whiteboard. We welcome any other ideas from the MozFest organising team to further improve our ideas
We're hoping that many efforts and discussions will continue after Mozfest. Share any ideas you already have for how to continue the work from your session.:We want to keep the session really open and fairly unstructured so that we have space to explore potential ideas for how to continue / build upon what we discuss and learn. Of course the session will be used to further develop our advocacy and campaign plans afterwards. But in addition, it would be great to find new coalitions, be inspired by ideas, and explore opportunities to bring more art and culture into our campaigning work. We have the capacity to follow up with participants that are interested in being more involved, especially if they want to do so in creative or innovative ways!
What is the goal and/or outcome of your session?:Our campaign is built around principles of democracy, public awareness and participation, and amplifying voices that are not often heard in EU technology/policy debates. Therefore this session gives us a great opportunity to engage with a broad and diverse community, and to listen and learn from them about what issues relating to biometrics and biometric mass surveillance matter most to them in their lives. This will then inform our advocacy and campaign work, and hopefully will also open up opportunities for us to explore other community ideas (such as art, activism, artivism and more!)
Ella is a policy and campaigns officer at EDRi. In her work, she focuses on issues of artificial intelligence technologies such as biometrics, and the associated risks to human rights.
Mobilising for digital rights in a constantly changing world, Andreea works with maturing EDRi's campaigning capacity, co-creating and co-leading network-wide calls to action.