King’s Academy hosted a webinar on data protection and privacy to raise awareness about possible threats to personal data and how to protect against them. Around 60 students, faculty and parents attended the session that was led by program coordinator at Jordan Open Source Association Raya Sharbain. 

“With data protection and privacy becoming more and more mainstream, it’s important to discuss and reflect on such topics to increase our understanding of the trade-offs between privacy, convenience and the use of new exciting technologies,” says Sanad Haddad, a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Computational Thinking who organized the event.

Sharbain educated attendees on the consequences of not protecting their data and the impact of possible breaches, on the proper handling of data, how data is legally collected or stored, how to protect data against the threat of surveillance, end-to-end encryption techniques that provide an extra layer of privacy, and on how big tech companies invade personal data. The webinar raised awareness about the kinds of data that is collected by modern apps and websites, and the ways this may lead to the sharing of private data with third parties.

“When data that should be kept private gets into the wrong hands, bad things can happen, so the more we know about the topic, the better we will be able to protect our data against cyber threats,” says Haddad.