Protecting our Privacy: Strengthening Accountability for Public Surveillance | Policy Magazine

May 8, 2024 | In Policy Magazine’s Emerging Voices series each year, Max Bell School MPPs are asked to write articles on issues important to them. In the fifth article for 2024, Asha Sivarajah underscores the importance of safeguarding privacy rights while ensuring transparency and accountability in public institutions' use of surveillance technologies. Asha has prior experience at the Canadian International Council (CIC) and as a researcher in El Salvador. She now seeks to leverage her research and advocacy experience to design policies that help advance human rights protections, particularly in the data & technology sector. 

“Beyond legal reform, there needs to be more participatory engagement in setting the digital policy agenda – especially when it comes to online surveillance. This includes engagement with academics and civil society organizations who are aware of how open-source data collection and automated decision-making in policing can have disparate impacts on historically marginalized groups.”