Jessica Dheere is former director of Ranking Digital Rights. She is the founder, former executive director, and board member of SMEX, the Middle East’s leading digital rights research and advocacy organization. As a 2018–19 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, she launched the CYRILLA Collaborative. She is also a member of the 2019-20 class of Technology and Human Rights Fellow at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. Dheere has presented at the Internet Governance Forum, the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy, RightsCon, and the International Journalism Festival.
Her recent publications include “Misguiding Multistakeholderism: A Nongovernmental Perspective on the Arab IGF,” and a legal research methodology for locating digital rights-related law. She is a member of the inaugural Advisory Network to the Freedom Online Coalition, and co-chair of the policy committee of the Global Network Initiative.
She graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in art history and Latin American studies and earned her master’s in media studies from the New School in New York City. In 2014, she was awarded a scholarship to study intensive Arabic as a Middlebury College Kathryn Davis Fellow for Peace.
Algorithms now shape nearly every facet of our digital lives. They collect and process vast amounts of user data, compiling sophisticated profiles about every user. They categorize us according to our demographics, behaviors, location data. They also make assumptions about our likes and dislikes, also
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