Blogs

Two panelists, PatyMori from Marialab in Brazil and Anais Cordova from Ecuador’s Navegando Libres, shared their perspectives on promoting digital security and resilience within their communities.

During the last week of September, the Greater Internet Freedom (GIF) team hosted the Organizational Security Village (OrgSec Village), a four-day event in sunny Estoril, Portugal, as a satellite event of Team CommUNITY’s Global Gathering.

There is a significant cybercrime crisis in Zambia, involving issues such as money fraud, bank hacking, surveillance, Internet abuse, and cyberbullying, which have affected the community for years.

Over the years, Uganda has remained in a perpetual state of limited Internet freedom and digital rights. The freedom of expression online is suppressed, posing threats to numerous media and digital rights activists in the country.

In the digital age, where the Internet has become an essential part of everyday life, the question of digital rights and digital security is more critical than ever. In Sri Lanka, the Greater Internet Freedom’s (GIF) local partner – Hashtag Generation, organization led and run by a group of young tech-savvy, socially conscious Sri Lankans, has been working on advocating for the meaningful civic and political participation of youth, especially young women and young people from minority groups. And since the start of the GIF project, their focus expanded on informing the youth, as well as marginalized groups, about digital rights and how to protect them, as well as on digital security, and how to stay safe in online spaces.

Being conflict-ridden, DRC presents a plethora of challenges in advancing Internet freedom and digital security.

The Office of Civil Freedoms in Tajikistan has initiated efforts to protect personal data in the country through a strong collaboration with the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and Ranking Digital Rights (RDR). This effort, part of the Greater Internet Freedom (GIF) project, seeks to engage the government, business sector, and society in a concerted drive to enhance digital rights in the country.

As technology use increases globally, the disparity between communities with access to information and communication technologies and those without has become more pronounced. This digital divide manifests in various ways, including discrepancies in Internet connection quality and speed, digital literacy, and technology utilization.

With a population nearing 20 million, Kazakhstan is the second most populous country in Central Asia, and these numbers are projected to continue growing. The population of Kazakhstan is young, with a median age of 29, and the majority are avid internet users. The potential for digital entrepreneurship, e-commerce, and online education is vast, and the internet and digital sector play a significant role in everyday life.

For nearly a decade, Iraq has experienced periodic internet shutdowns as a means to address pressing security concerns, bureaucratic needs and to curb cheating on official exams. While these shutdowns are used to address the government’s immediate concerns, they raise significant issues related to the rights to freedom of expression and association, as well as access to information. They also severely impact the economy and trust in government. The use of internet shutdowns reflects the Iraqi government’s lack of strategic thinking in the digital age.

According to a 2022 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) report, the “roughly 1.1 billion people” lacking official identity are in many ways “invisible, discounted, and left behind.” Without a national identity, these individuals face barriers to accessing public services, exercising voting rights, and, in some cases, utilizing services offered by the private sector, like bank accounts and SIM cards. Indeed, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call on UN member states to provide legal identity for all, including free registration at birth, as one means to bridge socio-economic divides.

Over the past years, one of the topics we see taking over the agenda of the civic space security field is the creation of organizational security policies that will help NGOs, media outlets, collectives, and other groups to design and institutionalize their security controls and protocols, as well as help sustain these efforts in a better way. Given challenges like high staff turnaround that is usual globally, the security interventions and their quality can be better justified, and their effects can be longer-lasting, maximizing the impact of the activities we conduct in projects like our very GIF project.

As Indonesia’s general election draws closer, the spread of hate speech targeting political figures is expected to intensify, similar to what happened in the 2019 election.

Cybersecurity experts say Serbian state bodies and public enterprises are failing to act on indications that the email credentials of their employees are being sold on the dark net.

Обзор нового закона по вопросам инфобеза, информатизации и цифровых активов в части изменения законодательства в сфере персональных данных.

In recent years, the civil society community witnessed very positive changes in the way digital emergencies are addressed for NGOs, small media outlets, and other social groups: Better processes to grab information about incidents, the creation of helpdesks, and resources to make the Incident Response process more accessible, are some of the strategies we have nowadays to improve the effectiveness of digital security reactive processes. However, those advances are helpful after incidents occur. When looking for more comprehensive security strategies, we should also consider proactive measures to help avoid and reduce the impact, as well as quickly detect and react to the many threats our communities are vulnerable to.

The overall goal of this approach is to support civil society globally, and especially digital security practitioners from the global majority to own more digital security processes and knowledge within their communities, incorporating specialized knowledge and skills that until now has resided mainly with international organizations, usually far away (geographically and situationally) from the local context.

Women and girls in Africa form a key constituency and a distinct category in their experiences in using the internet compared to men and boys. Plan International points out that while technology and the internet can be a great enabler for women and girls, lack of opportunities and skills, and fear of discrimination, could prevent many from using and creating digital tools and online content.

This study carried out by Coding Rights analyzed the pilot implementation of Whatsapp Pay in Brazil. The country is the second in the world to implement this service, the first was India. Data colonialism? Beyond data protection debates, this case is fascinating because it (finally) raised the attention of Brazilian competition authorities about Facebook (Meta)’s monopolistic position and exposed the need for cooperation within regulatory authorities on data protection, competition law and consumer rights.