Enabling Social Inclusion Through Human- Centered Approaches To Cybersecurity

While asymmetries in digital access are decreasing globally, inequities in digital skills and opportunities are expected to increase, alongside exposure to cyber threats, cybercrime, and online violence. Even with growth in global cybersecurity investments seeking to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of digital infrastructure and resources, individuals, businesses, and nation-states still face increasing cyber risks. There is a disproportionate prevalence of cyber insecurity and greater negative impacts of cyber threats on marginalized individuals and communities, particularly women and girls. These issues undermine social inclusion, reduce trust, and stymy economic growth and the lack of progress in attending to them. This alludes to inadequacies in our current efforts that are exacerbated by technocentric framing of cybersecurity. To effectively support social and digital inclusion, a key theme in the G20 Digital Agenda, cybersecurity policy-making needs to move beyond a focus on the security of digital artifacts to centralize the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals and communities. This human-centered approach focuses on the role human factors play in perpetrating, preventing, and responding to cyber risks and broadens our prevention and intervention efforts to reduce individual level harms to health and wellbeing and sociocultural harms such as exclusion and lack of trust. This policy brief extends the current narratives around cybersecurity and makes recommendations on ways for the G20 to effectively position humans (rather than technology) as the primary subjects of cybersecurity. Framing cybersecurity from this perspective harmonizes states’ commitments and aspirations to respect human rights, to promote the development of the digital economy, and to reduce risks to international peace and security.