Participants:
Aura Salla, Public Policy Director, Head of EU Affairs at Facebook
Andrejs Vasiljevs, Cofounder and Chairman of the Board of Tilde, Board Member of the Big Data Value Association
Līga Raita Rozentāle, Senior Director of European Cybersecurity Policy, Microsoft
Michael Bociurkiw, Global Affairs Analyst Josef Schroefl, Deputy Director of the COI Strategy and Defense, European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats
Moderator: Jānis Sārts, Director, NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
The speakers started with a discussion on the growing influence of data on modern societies. Facebook is not a democratizing force, but consumers provide their data to Facebook and other platforms to get free services. However, this data is used by them for opaque commercial and other purposes. The speaker prompted that more regulation is needed for services like Facebook, especially as they are taking on the role of a utility rather than a service. China is in position to bend digital companies into compliance; Apple took down Quran apps in used by more than a million people at the request of the government. The extreme of digital dependencies has already been reached by China, which turned its country into a digital laboratory during the pandemic, with surveillance software and hardware increasingly integrated. Face scans are mandatory for people buying phones, CCTV cameras are embedded into front doors and even inside private residence. The issue is that Chinese technology is rapidly being exported into the rest of southeast Asia, also transferring the surveillance state value set.
On the other hand, the second discussant sees data as an empowering tool – data is not just a new frontier in power, but in many respects. It needs to be used; the question is how. It needs and can be a key driver of the economy, which is increasingly dependent on the data flows – thus there is a universal need for states to make data more available. Microsoft tries to make data as open as possible, but also behind the use of data are complex data cloud services that must ensure the security of the data. Data is thus a complex concept – how it’s used, anonymized, transferred, and filtered are all key elements.
Speakers outline the growing use of data maliciously – both by state and non-state actors. Actions and direct regulatory frameworks will have to be created to contain the malicious use. A speaker responded by noting that data is a critical infrastructure – we cannot globally address how it will be used, but should try to find common ground in the transatlantic. As seventy percent of data is held by China and the US, they are unavoidable parts of the discussion.
The next discussant further qualifies that data is oil in the 21st century. It is fueling AI which is changing how every sector provides its services. AI – in turn – needs three factors – data, machine learning algorithms, and computing power. Europe lags behind China and the US in availability of data, but also has the issue of brain drain. In computing power, China has the most, with US in second place and EU lagging behind. There’s a lot of fragmentation in data, between public and private sectors – the data spaces for sharing data critical to consolidating and embracing the ai factors. Latvia is showing great human language data accumulation capacity – for that data and smart algorithms are critical. The next frontier is quantum computing, that will enable processing at a in a much larger scale. However, for that Europe needs data troves that don’t exist yet.
In a concluding discussion the discussants agree that in practice there is less and less individual understanding of the workings of devices, which are growing dependent on dozens of architectures just to provide the application layer. As the complexities of data increase, so does risk. Without understanding the complexity of the systems, the West cannot manage them. At this point, many countries are willfully unprepared for cyber incursions or cyber activity generally. Governments are not prepared because- looking at the EU joint cyber unit – industry is not an active participant, while they are practically the first responder. Governments are slow in this process, and they need trusted partnerships with industry partners. The EU has a critical role in helping in this regard.