Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Beatriz Botero Arcila for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Beatriz and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Creating more opportunities than risks with access to data and information

2. Navigating and evolving the relationship between tech and governance

3. The debate around regulating user-generated content

4. Solving the problem of lack of access to information and metrics

5. How successful information sharing impacts daily life

6. Data governance challenges in the next years

About our host:

Johan Lievens is the podcasting host at Outgrow.co. He is a Fulbright scholar and a Harvard law grad, with a strong interest in teaching, training, and coaching that emphasizes active learning, empowerment, and group dynamics. He is the winner of VU Amsterdam’s Teacher Talent Award 2020.

About our guest:

Beatriz Botero Arcila is a Colombian lawyer who started her career in environmental law and later discovered her interest in technology law while studying for her LLM and Ph.D. at Harvard University. She has been working in the field of city digitalization and information governance and currently teaches at Stanford Law School, at the Berkman Klein Center. She works with the Edgelands Institute, focusing on information governance in cities with an emphasis on security and surveillance.

EPISODE 098: Navigating the Intersection of Tech and Governance

The Intro!

Johan Lievens: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s marketer of the month. I’m your host, Dr. Johan Lievens, and for this month we’re going to interview Beatriz Botero Arcila, who is an assistant professor of law at Stanford Law School and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. And she specialized in data governance. Thanks for joining us, Beatriz.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Very, very happy to be here. Thank you.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

Johan Lievens: Wonderful. So, Beatriz, we’re going to start with a rapid-fire round just to break the ice. You get in these rapid-fire round-three passes. In case you don’t want to answer the question. You can just say pass. But try to keep your answers to one word. Or one sentence only. Are you ready?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I’m ready.

Johan Lievens: Wonderful. At what age do you want to retire?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I don’t know. I would like to have enough certainty like financial certainty, I’d say 60 to retire but I don’t know that I want to fully retire ever. We’ll see.

Johan Lievens: How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: When I’m at my best, maybe 45 minutes

Johan Lievens: How many hours of sleep can you survive on?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I can survive on six hours, but only for one or two days in a row. Then might need aid.

Johan Lievens: What is one thing you regret spending money on?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I have a funny story about that. I want but this is like the revolt of Americans. This is hard to describe only on audio. It’s like a globe of,a very Green Globe of our basketball team. And it’s made of like plastic. And it’s huge for curing on a mat. And it cost me like $20 and it’s ridiculous. And it’s something that’s still standing in my living room to remind me to spend my money better.

Johan Lievens: What movie do you enjoy quoting the most?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I don’t know. I got better. Maybe, Spider-Man. With great power comes great responsibility. But I could do better with that question. I don’t know.

Johan Lievens: If you could be transformed into one animal. Which animal would you choose?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I would like to be either a lioness or some sort of bird.

Johan Lievens: Who is your favorite Disney character?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: My favorite Disney character?

Johan Lievens: You can pass.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: No, that’s such a good question. One of my favorite Disney movies was Aladdin. So maybe Aladdin. I don’t know.

Johan Lievens: What are you most looking forward to?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Good question. I have a very exciting wedding happening in Mexico. Later this year, that might be fun. I don’t know.

Johan Lievens: What is one thing you wish you enjoyed more?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I wish I enjoyed parts of my work more. I wish I stressed less about them and enjoy the process more and just knew the hard is part of it.

Johan Lievens: What never fails to make you laugh?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Tickle.

Johan Lievens: How do you relax?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I like to go out for dinner. Do yoga, go for a round.

Johan Lievens: Which element of your current life with your 12-year-old self think of as cool?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I live abroad and travel quite a bit.

Johan Lievens: How many cups of coffee do you drink per day?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Currently, I’m at three.

Johan Lievens: And then the last one, the most valuable skill you’ve learned in life?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Discipline,

Johan Lievens: You got yourself with discipline to this rapid-fire round.

The Big Questions!

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Maybe also, you know maybe like just being a bit relaxed and letting it flow. It’s a mixture of a hard balance with both.

Johan Lievens: Yeah, but so if we talk about discipline, what more can you say about that? What’s the skill there for you?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I don’t know. I think there’s something about being consistent and constant with the things that you want to achieve which don’t have to work right though. There might be like, relationships that you want to cultivate or things that you want to get good at. We’re doing sports or something just being consistent and trying over and over. I think that’s a valuable skill.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. Okay. This is a nice introduction or a pre-introduction to who you are. But it would be nice for our listeners to get to know you a bit better as well. So can you tell us a bit about your background? And how you became interested in studying data governance in urban environments and the legal side of that?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Right there? Yeah, so my name is Beatriz Botero Arcila, I’m a Colombian lawyer, and I grew up in Colombia in Bogota. And when I first started, one of my first jobs out of university was in environmental law at the local level. So one of the things we were litigating and talking about with clients was, who should be able to decide environmental policy at the local or national level, and that was relevant because the national level had more vision and interest towards economic development than the local level. The local level was very focused on, let’s say, local pollution, for example. And the national level was trying to balance where to get revenue from to pay for national health care, and that involved a more tolerant of things like mining. And mining especially was what I was working on. So I started working on CDs first. And then I went to my gratification, I did my LLM and Ph.D., at Harvard university in the US. When I was there, I started discovering this world of technology law, I had a perfect friend working on AI, and she would take me to lunch talks and events. And that seemed super interesting. And quickly on I discovered this is, this is what I want to do this, or these are the people I want to play with, sort of. And so my way through that was to find something that already had something to do with what I worked on, which was cities in the field that I wanted to be in, which was technology. So I ended up discovering that there was this growing field of the signification of cities. And that’s sort of how I ended up there. And then I graduated from Harvard and went to teach at Stanford Law School, which is where I’m now and I work, and I still research a range of these things. And I started at an NGO at the Berkman Klien Center called the Edgelands Institute, where we also focus on information governance questions in cities, but mostly when they’re used for security or surveillance purposes.

Johan Lievens: Yeah, can you make it a bit more palpable still for us what kind of topics do you work on then?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Right, so yeah, that makes sense. Thank you. So one of them that might be familiar to many cities. I mean, people who live in large cities how do we regulate Airbnb? Like how much can you sublet an apartment before it turns into a hotel is like a hotel, but it has like, it owns no real estate. So one of the things that I’ve done some research on is how our city is dealing with how Airbnb has changed the way people live in the cities before you will have tourists somewhere, and residents elsewhere. And now you have tourists with a residence. And that changes a bunch of dynamics at the local level. So Airbnb is the type of thing that I’ve looked at. Uber is not so different, in that Uber also has interesting questions, for example, about the mobility data that they have. So cities or urban planners are very interested in knowing what the data of E-scooters or Uber reveals. Because it’s interesting to know what further projects they should pursue, right? Like if you think about the scooter cases, maybe there’s this very famous shortcut everyone is taking. But then if you have the data, you have the mobility data of that scooter, you might build a bike lane through that path. But that requires knowing one of the things that it’s hard to imagine for us is how difficult access to information still is, but was many years ago. And so that’s one of the things that I look at should cities have access to that data. And then one of the there’s, they’re very good things that you can do with it. You can improve your bike length infrastructure, for example. But that also creates surveillance and privacy risks. Right? Like, it doesn’t seem very risky, though. We use that information for planning. But what if police departments or immigration agencies, I mean, the police departments and immigration agencies are still super important, but for a variety of reasons, we’ve decided that they need some checks on their power. So one of the things that I look at is how we enable access from different people to the information that we all collectively produce with our smartphones with our different devices. And how do we make sure that doesn’t create more risks than the many opportunities that it creates? Does that make sense?

Johan Lievens: Yeah.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Cool.

Johan Lievens: Would you say if you have to choose that, is this a dark story of the government versus tech initiatives? Or is it a happy story with a lot of opportunities?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Good question. I think it’s somewhere in the middle of both. There are many happy stories where you have, I don’t know, where you have thick companies collaborating in different ways with the government to see where people were, I don’t know, at high risk of contamination during the pandemic, or something like you have those. And that’s a happy story, I think. And you also have risks and sob stories of people who are in the Netherlands, you in the Netherlands have this terrible story of an AI system that was bad to use and badly deployed in the Social Security system, and harmed a bunch of families. And that’s a terrible story. And I think somewhere in the middle, there’s a lot of complexity, right? Like, I think there’s a very real need for governments to be efficient. Like, I don’t think we want inefficient governments. And so one of the questions is, how do we make efficiency work? How do we make it good, and take very good for that, I think there are a lot of people who are learning as they go. And there are a lot of people trying to do their job well, but still trying to understand how things work. And I think when we go with adherence to different cities, and talk to city officials, and so on, a lot of what we find is a lot of complexity and people trying to figure it out. And it’s still up for societies, in different places, it’s different to figure out exactly how these things evolve.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. So we’re now looking at a distinction you made between the government intervening with things happening if it would shift the perspective to the tech site. While different governments and different jurisdictions are trying to figure out how to regulate stuff, how to regulate user-generated content or their regulating information? Do you think there’s a responsibility on the side of the tech industry to collaborate with the government to decide the best course of action?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: That’s an interesting question. Yeah, to a certain extent, but not too many, right? Because that question depends on what type of government you have in mind when you ask it or when you answer it. Right? So if I’m thinking about the happy Urban Planner, my immediate answer is like, yeah, of course, like, why wouldn’t you give us data on where should we feel more by bike paths? But they’re bad governments, or they’re their authoritarian governments out there. I don’t wanna say bad governments, but they’re just infrastructures of enforcement of society that are less stress worthy sometimes. And you don’t necessarily want tech companies to collaborate with them. But one of the things that you see, you know, a bunch of civil uprisings around the world, is that in an authoritarian government, social media proves a very important outlet for protesters. And that’s an example in which you maybe don’t want the government to collaborate with social media. So I think that’s a tricky balance. I think in general, though, tech companies have a moral responsibility, but also our business interest in trying to do what’s best for society. You know, like, to what extent consumers respond to company policies is I think, unclear. But in general, companies have an interest in making sure their users and their clients feel that they’re not the worst in the universe, right, so that their data is safe. But the information that you see is somewhat accurate, and so on. And I think you in general duty, at least the larger tech companies in moving in that direction.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. There’s an optimistic tone in this story.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah, I would be an optimist. I probably am a cautious optimist. Not all of it is great, though. But people are trying to do good things, I think.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. And if we look at the other side, the government side, do you believe that governments should routinely collect and share information on the success and failure of different technological policy measures across?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I think they should. And one of the things that you don’t see is a lot of that. So a bunch of projects like they had a partnership with a company to do some experiments somewhere. And maybe that doesn’t succeed. And one of the things that we researchers struggle with is having access to the information of what we’re doing metrics, and what didn’t work. And I think that’s also something that doesn’t quite work for governments in the long run, because it’s very hard to learn from experiences, like there’s a short-termism that’s attached to government regarding elections and so on, you know when I say that your project failed, but because there’s that incentive, there’s also very little informing. You can learn from the things that work and the things that don’t. So you see the garments, like replicating mistakes around the world, and maybe also not learning the way they could.

Johan Lievens: Do you have examples of this mistake that keeps returning?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah, I have a colleague and she’s been doing a lot of research on smart city projects, which are big partnerships between tech companies and cities, to improve Wi-Fi, infrastructure, and so on. And one of the things that her research shows is that many of these projects eventually don’t work out and they get just quietly shut down. So the partnership no longer exists, and you stop seeing the signs of whatever is around in a park somewhere. But the governments are very cautious to speak about it. So there’s another city elsewhere, two hours away from CDA that now finds a new partnership. Because they seem that these partnerships show an interest in doing something but the city doesn’t have like the information maybe this is my interpretation. That’s not exactly Bourjo’s research, but she’s been very good at following how this company how these projects look quietly shut down and don’t work. And I think, yeah, so that’s an example. This is mostly in the US. But I could imagine that something similar might happen in some cities in Europe.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. And it’s almost funny that it’s called smart cities, but then they’re not smartly learning from each other’s experience. Yeah.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah, there’s stuff that works in some places, but then how do we convey what works and what doesn’t? I think the world can do better at that.

Johan Lievens: Do you see examples of where it goes? Well, where information is actually shared and learned from?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: That’s a good one. Yeah, sure. Let me think of one. I think, for example, the city of Amsterdam has an interesting project on AI governance that I’m looking at right now. And how they make they have like a register to know what type of things what type of AI systems, you have a city government under sharing that information. And, that’s supposed to be very interesting. I’m looking at it. But that’s a very promising example. I think it’s also rather new.

Johan Lievens: And it’s about AI. Elements in the policy.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah. So they’re publishing for civil society to see our scrutinize. Where does the city government use systems? And how does it use it? And that’s like, a very interesting example of a city that like, wants to do things well, and it’s polishing stuff. So I haven’t looked at it in depth. So I don’t know exactly how well it’s working. But that I think, is sort of in the right direction. And then you also see open data portals, they’re big. Amsterdam sees huge, a Barcelona city is huge. And those are systems that sometimes are used by particulars to do things that they want to do. So slowly, I think, you know, one of the things that I think we are still at a point where we have to figure out exactly how good information sharing looks like, at least in government, because the level of granularity, information is not like an apple, you have to produce, you have to ask the system, what information he needs to give you. And so, sometimes, you know, tech companies share mobility data, but it might be not granular enough for the city government wants to do, but they’re still sharing it. So there’s a lot of nuance in the middle. But I think there’s also a bunch of infrastructures that we use in daily life. And we don’t even notice part of it is anchored on information, sharing services that work, right, like the app that you use on your phone, to figure out when your bus is coming. There’s an information system working there where the bus company has an API, where the app developer can connect, and is giving you this insight. And those are things that work and make life a little bit more convenient.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. And those examples are maybe also examples in which you see that we need collaboration between government and private initiatives. Because if we were still if I look at my own country and the experiences if we were still using only public data, we would still be in medieval times in terms of planning routes and stuff.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah.

Johan Lievens: Well, it’s the collaboration with Google Maps and other services that have shifted that. The possibilities, maybe,

Beatriz Botero Arcila: For sure. That’s an excellent way of putting it.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. You already mentioned the Edgelands Institute earlier. You’re one of the co-founders and then the head of HR Research, I think, yep. The Edgelands Institute aims to help communities redraw their urban social construct in an era of mass urbanization and surveillance.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah.

Johan Lievens: Can you tell us a bit more statement?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: We’re working on our mission statement. Yeah. I don’t know how clear that is, to be honest. But that’s actually what we mean. One of the things that we see in different places around the world is increased polarization driven in part by social media. But security threats are also getting more urbanized as maybe the world becomes urbanized. But they’re also other factors. So you have, for example, drug cartels being very active in various cities or in various cities around the world and creating dynamics of urban insecurity. You have war, being a very urban thing like if you follow the war in Ukraine, everything is about the cities, there’s, you don’t see us in the movies where the armies meet in the middle of nowhere to fight. It’s all about taking over our city, the siege of a city, and so on. So security has this urban dynamic, and it’s very technology fight so we follow war through social media, you see a robber, doing something through social media there are CCTV cameras everywhere. There’s a hotlist and so on. Hot leads are tools for governments to sort of map the dangerous places in our cities. So they can deploy security forces more in that area than in others. And others like this concern, which is, I think, firstly, an academic concern, but there’s some proof to it in different places, that the use of the dynamics of security and digitization can lead to further forms of discrimination of segregation, fragmentation of society, you don’t have to go as far as physical segregation like, you might have a dynamic at home that has polarized your family and social media as part of it, you know, that you will have someone who shares a bunch of extremists messages, and WhatsApp and so on. And so one of the things that we want to do through very localized work in different cities around the world, is to understand the nuance of these dynamics. So I don’t think what I’m describing looks the same in Amsterdam, as in managing Norway in New York, you know, like, local dynamics are very different. And I think one of the chairs or we think that one of the challenges of the conversation is that we speak in very global terms without taking into consideration, what is what’s local, you know, like maybe some of the things that happened in WhatsApp, that are very extremist in Colombia, which is where I’m from, they are very positive, I don’t know. But when I look at their very localized example, and then throughout the health, local stakeholders worked with them, to figure out what local policy responses should be. So it’s about localizing a lot of this very academic international conversation, and creating momentum amongst local stakeholders so they can do what works best for them locally.

Johan Lievens: So how is it going so far? How is the work rolling of the Edgelands Institute?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: It’s fun. So we’re very young, we’re one year and a half. So one of our best achievements is that we exist and survive. But we’ve done work in cities for two and a half, we worked in managing, which is a big city in Colombia. We worked in Geneva, which is where we’re anchored corporately, at least, we’re working in our small city in Colombia called Kukuda, which is the key city on the border of Venezuela. And Venezuela has a huge, huge migrant crisis. And Kukuda is the epicenter of a bunch of security concerns in Colombia Colombia is not an easy country security-wise. And I’m so going to Nairobi because Nairobi is our next city. So we’re gonna go there and set up the team and everything. And one of the things that we do when we go to each city is tried to understand what the local conversation is about the local situation and create a set of activities or a moment where local stakeholders can own it in different ways. And that’s going well, you should all go online and check it out and see what you think. But I think generally, we have managed to have good reception in the different cities where we are, and get people interested. I think the next challenge is for us to be able to not you know our idea is not to be essential where we operate, we are a proper organization, which means that we are also set to disappear in three years. And it’s because we just don’t want to be the people who carry this conversation and own it from cyberspace or something we actually just want to create local momentum so that people can do what works for them. That remains a challenge exactly like how the work continues after us. But it’s interesting work, it’s interesting to make it intercultural to understand different contexts, different places, different difficulties, and different relationships to technology. So far we’ve built a great team that I’m super happy and proud of. They do everything. And so we’ve done some also very interesting research on how these things look like in different places. So, that’s going well,

Johan Lievens: You mentioned you work with people with local stakeholders, can you make that a bit more specific still like what kind of groups?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: So every time we show up in a city, we try to set up a local research team that has somewhere like three to four people that are from that city, or at least live and work in that city. And then we try to act, we try to work with nodes of the Civic sort of ecosystem of a place. So we usually work with a local university, and we try to reach NGOs that, for example, work with youth. We also try to work with the local government, for example, to understand what their concerns are, where they can also use our help, you know, like, I don’t think local governments are an important part of the conversation. We try to work with the local arts ecosystem because we think part of the things that happens when you’re talking about surveillance is that it isn’t the sexiest of topics. And most people are like, that’s too much for me. So we tried to work with arts or people who are in the creative industries, to make it a little bit sexier and a little bit more palpable, make it seem something that’s not that complicated, and actually might be interesting. And important for people who are, I mean, leaving, we are all connected, like, knowing a little bit about this, I think, should be general culture. And that’s what I mean. And then eventually what we try to create locally, and I think we managed to create a network of people who we know who become our friends who are interested in our work, who take us to wherever they are. And those are maybe professors or students, or just friends or friends, people who are in think tanks, and so on. And that’s sort of what I mean by local. I know that stakeholders might not be the best word.

Johan Lievens: No, it makes sense. It becomes more alive when you name these different groups. And when you describe the dynamics, that’s beautiful,

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Cool.

Johan Lievens: You have a diverse set of experiences you have an academic background, and you have practical experience as a legal adviser, also for a Fintech startup. I think your lecture on cyber law is. You have the Edgelands Institute, how do you think these diverse experiences have informed your work and your perspective on data governance?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: That’s interesting. So I think I have all those experiences. But I think I’m very much a lawyer, which is interesting, because I practiced, as you mentioned, as a legal counsel and a little bit, but I’ve been mostly in academia for most of my professional life. But I think I’ve approximated these conversations in different places, often as a lawyer. And I think one of the things that being a lawyer offers is a framework in which you think about problems as the interests of different people that are being negotiated through our societal system. So my approach is always about, I mean, I’m interested in creating value and falling value, and so on. But I’m also not very naive about what public value means even within public value through interest groups that benefit more than others. And it’s always our gain, I think that’s a very legal way of looking at it, there’s always someone arguing a case for someone, no matter how objective you are presenting. And my legal self, tends to think like, what is the lawyer behind this policy statement or something, thinking about? And, I think about that in terms of data governance as well, right? Like, who’s winning, and who’s losing when we share data in a particular way, or when we don’t? I care a lot about security, I grew up in a very insecure place. And I think security is important. And maybe Tech has a place to play there. And I’m thinking about, like, who’s winning and who’s losing when we criticize that in a particular way, or when we deploy it in a particular way? I think having a client in mind is something that sticks with me through all of that.

Johan Lievens: And it almost sounds like there’s a lady justice in the background. Because we want to but we want to put security on one side of the balance, we don’t want it to overscale to one side. So we need to protect privacy data as well on the other side.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: We don’t want security to mean insecurity for others, right?

Johan Lievens: Yeah. As a fellow lawyer, I see the dynamic and I understand it’s, it’s nice. What drives you to keep pushing forward in your research?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: My research? So research is one of the things where I sometimes struggle workwise. Yeah, back to your first set of questions. But I think that when I’m at my best, I think I’m a very curious person. And I like learning about different things. What I struggle with most is turning that into a piece of writing. And I think curiosity is a big driver. So even if many of the things I sometimes work on are stressful, it’s just so interesting to know what’s happening. I don’t know, in social media and the Ukraine war, you know, once I managed to go over my emotional reaction is like, “wow, like really, like is this?” And I think curiosity is a big driver and something that I tried to send around the focus.

Johan Lievens: Yeah, is that the bird that you mentioned that a lion or a bird would be your animal? Is that the bird flying over the planet trying to discover stuff?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Maybe? Maybe I hadn’t thought about it. Maybe it’s the bird for sure.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. Outside of your professional work, you are also a music lover, and you play the piano. Do you think your love of music has impacted your work and your approach to problem-solving?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah, I mean, I trained as a classical pianist. I don’t play as much anymore as I should or would like to. But for sure, I think playing piano taught me discipline and humility. And so maybe that also goes back to your first set of questions. Like, it’s something that you need to do every day for it to work. And you need to be patient with yourself and forgive yourself, but also be relentless in practice. And I think that’s something that I don’t do as much anymore. But the other thing that I think music gave me is, perhaps I love for people, you know, I like people. I’m a people person. I think sometimes I’m an introvert. But in general, I like engaging I like, it when you’re playing music, or when you’re listening to music, you hear different love stories. And that’s just a privilege for sure. And also performing. And this is funny, like, I think, many of the things that I do when I’m lecturing for sure. But also when I’m just in a meeting or even right now, there’s a performer, part of me that enjoys it. I’d like to be in the spotlight a little bit. And I’m engaging my audience. And I think I learned through music.

Johan Lievens: Yeah. Nice. You’re still on stage a bit. Back to data governance, what is according to you one of the main challenges, or maybe the biggest challenge, even in terms of data governments that we’re seeing in the coming months to coming years?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah, so I don’t know what the biggest one is. But I have one in mind that I’m thinking of, and is something related a lot to data security. So I think, increasingly, wherever you are, we’ve seen in the news, a lot of cyber attacks, that are not necessarily an organized crime, war-related, or overt, more like organized crime, but like, lower key, but they have very big implications. And so hearing Colombia, we have like this insurance company that was hacked, and the information of people was slowly leaked because they didn’t want to pay and so on. There was this big hack in a hospital in the south of France, that also put out there the information of a lot of patients. And I think, in our world, there was a big hack to the International Red Cross committee. They have super sensitive information about victims of war refugees, and so on. And I think in this very information-rich world that we live in, we have sometimes this digital infrastructure to keep it safe. But that’s still vulnerable. And I don’t think we still have governance frameworks to deal with what happens when all this information is out there and can potentially be used to harm someone. And one of the things that happened is that the harm still seems to be maybe there is no real harm. So maybe, but sometimes people are targeted with information that’s in the dark web of some sort. And that, to me, seems dangerous. And I think that’s only going to grow in the coming years. So we need to find ways to deal with that. That’s something that I’ve been reading a little bit lately and I find it very interesting.

Johan Lievens: And the focus in the way you’re talking about it is that not only on those Dealing the data but also what happens with the data after?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Yeah, so I’m a bit, you know, I think in a lot of data governance or personal privacy policy and so on, we still think of information in like, either or format. So either you are allowed to have it or use it or you don’t either you gave consent or you don’t either it’s open or it’s closed. And I’m the type of caller, I guess, that tends to think that we need to start focusing on users and regulating users. So that even if I have access to information that is out there, if that’s a forbidden use, I shouldn’t be able to use it. Because I think that might be the only way of regulating information that just flows so much, unexplored. And there’s like a paradox with something that I said earlier, because you, for example, still have local governments struggling to get mobility data. And on the other side, you have all our Twitter passwords leaked. Because they had a big hug a few years ago, and whatever. So there’s, like this imbalance and dissonance about how easy it is sometimes to access personal information and how hard it is sometimes to access valuable information. From a policy perspective, that’s anything focusing more on what are the uses of information that we want as a society to allow but users we don’t want to allow. Maybe asset forward?

Johan Lievens: Yeah. Okay, thank you. We are at our last question for today. And that’s a bit of a personal kind of question. What would you be doing in your life if not this?

Beatriz Botero Arcila: I would be, oh my goodness! I think I will be working in some form of economic development type of organization. One of my drivers is I care deeply about inequality and poverty, maybe it’s part of growing up in Colombia. So I will be working on something like that. Maybe with you running an NGO, some sort of hopefully, I don’t know, so ambitious. But like, I will be in that space, I guess. Or maybe I will be a lawyer like a normal lawyer. I don’t know. That was my first reaction. It’s, stays with that.

Let’s Conclude! 

Johan Lievens: Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much for your clear and honest answers. Thanks, everyone, for joining us for this month’s episodes of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. This was Beatriz Botero Arcila. Thanks for joining Beatriz. Check out their website Edgelands Institute for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another episode of the marketer of the month.

Beatriz Botero Arcila: Thank you. Thanks, everyone.