About Us - Conscious Digital

Our Story

Let’s Take Back Control

Of Our Digital Freedom

The early Internet was a place of wonder and infinite possibilities. A place where hackers had dethroned traditional gatekeepers, where net neutrality meant equal access and equal opportunities, and where newly anointed geeks where set on democratizing the world’s information. It seems that we have ended up with the complete opposite.

“

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that's a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset.
Andrew Grove, Intel Founder, 2000

“

Interdependence within society today is centered on the Internet beyond all other dependencies except climate, and the Internet has a time constant of change five orders of magnitude smaller than that of climate.
Dan Geer, A Rubicon, 2018

“

We are all data collectors, data keepers, data analysts. Some citizens do it explicitly; some citizens have it done for them by robots. To be clear, we are not just a society of informants, we are becoming an intelligence community of a second sort.
We are all Intelligence Officers Now, Dan Geer, 2014

“

As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. It feels ugly and rotten. Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.
Erin Griffith, Wired, 2017

“

The best, and perhaps only, way to preserve freedom is to prevent the ascendancy of algorithms, to not give algorithms a monopoly on the use of force, in neither the wide sense nor the narrow. The best, and perhaps only, way to not give algorithms a monopoly on the use of force is to retain society’s ability to tolerate that which is not managed by the algorithms. That, in turn, means retaining a non-digitized space for those who prefer to inhabit a non-digitized space.
Dan Geer, A Rubicon, 2018

Several negative trends in the digital space are threatening our human rights and personal freedom – the loss of privacy, rampant surveillance capitalism, micro-targeting and misinformation and the addictive nature of digital services. All of these trends are predicated by the widespread collection of and trade in personal data.

The Internet was created by individuals, governments, academic and military institutions and corporations. Over the decades since it’s inception our individual and collective dependence on the digital space has grown to a degree where it now makes sense to consider it a basic human right. The Internet however does not benefit from the same recognition and protection enjoyed by other basic human rights.

Conscious Digital was created in order to empower people to take back control of their digital freedom. We aim to promote and advance Digital Human Rights by creating people centered digital initiatives. It is funded by it’s creators, and with the help of your donations.

Watch Have we poisoned the Internet for good? A Talk by Yoav Aviram

Conscious Digital Was Founded By

Founder

Yoav Aviram

Digital Activist, Business Leader, Advisor, Investor

Yoav is a Public-Interest Technologist, Business Leader, Advisor and Investor. He believes that the establishment of advertising as the predominant revenue model for the web and the subsequent rise of surveillance capitalism threatens our privacy and basic freedom, and that we are increasingly dependency on the digital space, without a real ability to opt-out.

Yoav also works with innovative organizations who embrace new ways of being, thinking and working in the capacity of an adviser, to help facilitate business model and product innovation. He works with ethical organizations, who deliver an over all positive social impact. He has founded several companies, and works as an adviser with many others, from startups to Fortune 500 and global brands.

Founder

Rafa Prada

Design Consultant and Visiting Lecturer at The Bartlett (UCL) and London College of Communication (UAL)

Rafa is a Product Designer, Mentor and Guest Lecturer at The Bartlett (UCL) and London College of Communication (UAL). His work lies in the intersection of Art, Design and Technology with an emphasis on collaboration practices.
He is a founder member of Made Abroad, a creative studio focused on creating meaning products and experiences.

Join Us

Are you concerned about the loss of privacy, rampant surveillance capitalism, micro-targeting and misinformation and the addictive nature of digital services? Then we’d love to hear from you! We’re looking for volunteers, particularly React developers and data scientists, but anyone is welcome.