INTERVIEW WITH DATA RIGHTS ACTIVIST BRITTANY KAISER

BRITTANY KAISER

INTERVIEW WITH BRITTANY KAISER

Brittany Kaiser · Co-Founder at Own Your Data Foundation, #OwnYourData campaign, and DATA (the Digital Asset Trade Association) Brittany Nicole Kaiser is the former business development director for Cambridge Analytica, which collapsed after details of its misuse of Facebook data were revealed to have potentially impacted voting in the UK Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. presidential election. ue where do you see this heading

Russ - Other than the obvious goal of #OwnYourData.. What motivates you and how are you working towards making these goals happen?

Brittany - My goal in this entire data rights and privacy conversation is to enable people to protect their own human rights and achieve their basics needs for themselves and their families what the ultimate goals really is. Is for people to able to own their data and received a dividend or a portion of this multi trillion-dollar industry.

What Mark Zuckerberg will tell is that our data is only worth 17 dollars a quarter because he doesn’t want you to care about it. But what he fails to recognise it that 2 billion people live on less than 2 dollars a day so 17 dollars a quarter is life changing for billions of people already and that’s just if we take Mark Zuckerberg’s word for what our Facebook data alone is worth.

You’ve also asked me how am I going to achieve that and it’s three different programs or initiatives at once and that’s firstly education and then legislation and regulation and lastly technology.

So the more laws and regulations that we can come up that don’t stifle innovation that still allow the good actors you know well meaning entrepreneurs to innovate and build technology but it protects us from the bad in consumers and users rights they’re just interested in producing profits for their shareholders. We need technology that will protect our privacy, we need technologist that can build us solutions that allow us to own our data and stop our data from flowing out of our devices.

Russ - The option to share ones data is not actually a choice in the US, it’s an automated pre-opted decision made by the United States government, this is truly a matter of concern! how can this be prevented and if things continactors who are not interested

in the future?

Brittany – You’re exactly right, we have no national data legislation that opts us out like you luckily do in the European union, where you are opted out and you have to opt in explicitly to what you are willing to have your data collected for and used for,

I really look towards a near future where we can have a natural privacy legislation in every country so that our dats rights are protected in law.

But now as we don’t have that legislation it means that we need as much information for people as possible so that they understand how to protect their privacy themselves and we need as many technology products as possible.

At this point in the United States I would say that it’s technology that’s going to protect us, it’s education that’s going to protect us because right now the law is not in a place where it will, it’s getting there. I actually just got off a round table discussion with Alastair Mactaggart who helped write CCPA and is leading on Prop24 the update to that in California and that;s the strongest and nearly only privacy legislation we have in the United States.

Russ – It has come to light as you made us aware that people data was unethically used and abused in the 2016 US and Brexit elections. How do we regulate this kind of data abuse?

Brittany – The 2016 both US and Brexit elections are a prime example of why we need our data rights, the situations was that we never consented for our data to by these individuals. Even specifically in the Brexit case members of the UKIP party did not consent for their data to be used for the leave EU campaign.

And that’s one of the specific issues that I brought to light as a whistle-blower. And in the US governance owners did not consent for their data to be used to support Donald Trump but that’s how their data was used.

Russ - Could you summarize exactly what was going on, what your role was at Cambridge Analytica and just some of the thoughts that were going through your head at the time of this event?

Brittany – When I came out as

a whistle-blower on march 2018 I started a campaign to kick off the own your data movement and that was specifically to ask Facebook to let us own our data, to give us control about what’s collected about us and how it’s going to be used. And if it’s going to be used to pay us for it. I’m still advocating for exactly the same thing and were starting to see laws around the country that are starting to provide those types of rights.

To explain my role at Cambridge Analytica it helps to understand how I got there. I got involved in technology and politics on the 07/08 Obama campaign at 19. I was one of the first people to join the media team at their HQ with Chris Hughes the Co-Founder of Facebook and a handful of other people where we really invented a social media strategies and started building the basic tools that you could use to collect data from social media it was very rudimentary in the beginning.

And what we could see is that the more data we had about people the more we understood what people care about. The more that we could create policies in our platform that actually solved the issues in American citizens and their families lives. I joined Cambridge Analytica part time while I was still righting my PHD to learn more about data science for my research after being there and realising how powerful these tools were I joined full time as a director of business development which meant I was flying around the world meeting with presidents or prime ministers or people that wanted to be government officials or commercials companies and helping them design a data strategy.

I saw this as incredibly exciting as a way to achieve more of my goals in my career but It wasn’t until I started realising what a black box industry that data science is that I really started to get nervous about the whole thing. I started seeing data scientists that were buying and selling data in Cambridge Analytica that were selling data for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and I thought oh my god.

If were this tiny start-up company and we’re spending millions of dollars on data then how big is this industry, this is a multi-trillion-dollar industry, and nobody know their data has created the largest market place in the world.

Russ - It must have been extremely scary during this time, what did you think could happen to you and what was your thought process?

Brittany - Becoming a whistle-blower was one of the scariest things I ever done it’s like jumping of a cliff without a parachute evening knowing

Brittany Kaiser pictured with Ben Leff Director of Communications at Own Your Data Foundation

you have a parachute let alone if that parachute works. Now I’ve always been a risk taker all my life, I’ve gone and worked in war zones etc..

So putting myself in danger for the greater good is something I’m kind of use to and that felt like what I needed to do at the time. I felt like I’m one of the only people that has access to this information that can help people or at least one of the only people that is willing to come out and help people. I have an opportunity to explain to people what is going on and also help everyone solve the systemic problems.

Russ - I hear you are now campaign manager for presidential candidate Brock Pierce, how’s that going for you?

It’s been an absolute honour to be campaign manager for my friend Brock Pierce when he came to me and told me that he wanted to run, I was so excited because he is one of thee god fathers of an industry. I would say Blockchain in general, distributed leger technology and industry that is most likely to solve all of the problems we have in privacy and data protection that we have today. Russ - What’s Brock like as a person and what is he fighting for? Brittany - Brock and I have tons of synergies in what we believe in the world which is why it was an absolute honour for a friend and a mentor of mine to tell that he wanted to run for president. Brock stands for so many issues that don’t get talked about in politics.

Number one is ethical technology innovation which upgrading America’s infrastructure, he also believes in data protection and data ownership and privacy, access to mental health care and addressing that.

Russ - You’ve gone from Business Development manager to Whistle-blower to 2 X CoFounder to Movie Star to Presidential Campaign Manager to being one of the coolest most courageous bad asses on the planet!!

What next for Brittany Kaiser?

Brittany - The three main things I’m working on are education, legislation and technology, as I mentioned earlier my own your data foundation teaches digital literacy I think an educated population, everyone learning how to protect themselves is one of the number one most important things.

Making sure that laws and regulations allow for innovation but protect us from bad actors. And thirdly technology as I really believe that it’s technologist that are going to be the most effective in protecting privacy and solving a lot of the problems we have in the world today that I don’t think we need to live with if we’re able to upgrade all of our infrastructure and use 21st century technol-

Interview by Russ Turner Director at Business Digest Magazine

ogy to the utmost of what it’s capable of.