Digital rights in the era of Big Tech and state collaboration

In the light of ever-increasing encroachment on, and infringement of, our lives in the digital domain, we spoke to Clair Fernandez who, as executive director of EDRi, is at the epicentre of the topic.

Dedicated to securing rights in the field of technology, EDRi mobilises and informs people about their rights, runs campaigns, and acts as a hub for NGOs and nonprofit organisations to work jointly together. With a network of about 50 members EDRi is active across the European region protecting and promoting human rights in the digital age.

Many member organisations come together to lobby and advocate European institutions on digital rights and EDRi works on the importance of civil society to centre a vision that reflects people's interests versus corporates or states, as Fernandez explains to us.

Digital rights and EDRi’s coverage area

To set the context we asked Fernandez what digital rights mean to EDRi and what aspects of it the organisation covers. She explained that digital rights can mean a lot of things, starting with civil liberties and human rights that are exercised in the digital age (including internet and online activities), but also going beyond the online sphere and entering what she described as ‘real life offline’ such as surveillance in general and algorithm surveillance.

“When it comes to the use of powers that are data-driven, for example, or in real life, but based on technology or data analysis”, Fernandez said. These include freedom of expression online as well as online safety, looking at hatred, and the consequence of how people are kept safe on the internet.

EDRi covers all of these areas as well as digital rights in respect to policing conducted through facial recognition and the use of data-driven analysis, “we work on state surveillance of journalists, or the use of technology to surveil migration and the crossing of borders”, she said.

Putting it all in one perfectly human-centric sentence Fernandez described digital rights work as “life, love, because technology affects a lot of our lives, of people in this day and age”. Later in our conversation we heard of examples that make it more clear how love can come into play in all of this.

Speaking to her it quickly also became clear that EDRi is all about giving people and users of digital products and services the ‘choice’ on their right to be free from surveillance and discrimination. And as a network of organisations, we were keen to know more about the challenges EDRi and its members face in this pursuit of securing our freedom to choose.

Capacity limitations challenge digital rights organisations

The first point highlighted is that member organisations can be of varying size and as such capacity and funding are key aspects, especially when going against big corporations.

This can be simply a matter of existence for the sector. “We enter a context where there's a lot of pressure on civil society and the nonprofit sector to just exist,” said Fernandez. Facing such existential pressures is just the beginning though.

Funding pressures can translate to extremely limited capacity compared to corporations, especially tech giants. “[Big Tech] lobbying capacity is exponentially increasing, especially in centres of powers like Brussels whereas our capacity combined to mainstream people's interests in decision making is extremely limited”, said Fernandez

She went on to share some insights on the challenges organisations face that work on social justice but have no specialisation on technology and the digital space. Capacity, thus, takes yet another shape.

“The capacity for organisations that are traditionally not working on technology or digital rights, but on just say social justice, on racial justice, or on migration, to also understand that technology and digital can be affecting their sector.” This can develop into a barrier to entry, “how to make sure that they can enter the field, that they can have their voices heard in discussions that are usually quite technical even though they are not always technical, they can be just political.”

Fernandez further elaborated on how the wide focus of the organisation can be a challenge in itself. “Our focus is extremely wide, [covering] all of our lives and rights and especially with the justice angle, which is to say that is not good to only have human rights protected, but of course some people can afford to exercise these rights in the context of power imbalances.

“So, to do that in 2024, where every part of our life is affected by digital technology is a lot to cover. There's been a lot of regulation at European level to follow. And yes, that can be quite overwhelming to decide where to intervene and how to have an impact.”

The confluence of state and Big Tech surveillance

Having spoken a fair bit about the organisations that seek to support our rights and their needs, it’s now time to find out about the real-life examples and cases of digital rights violations.

“There are plenty of examples, but often at the confluence of states and Big Bech kind of surveillance,” said Fernandez “So just this morning a teenager in the US was sentenced to jail because she took the morning after pill in the US and they kind of figured that out based on the exchange of messages on Facebook between her mother and herself.

“And that's just one example where essentially our private communication, even though sometimes on encrypted platforms – and that's the case for Meta Facebook - private messaging can be broken in order to read some of the content of our or from messages in the name of fighting crime.”

She emphasised that there are some very serious issues such as combatting terrorism and protecting children from, for instance, sexual abuse but also explains that “there are laws and practises that are proposed that would amount to general surveillance and scanning of our online communication. That's like introducing these vulnerabilities that would lead to specially surveil as in that example.”

Another example she outlines is on “people who are exercising their rights to health, it could also be LGBTI community, it can be journalists, human rights defenders and so on.

“Other examples would be around the use of technology to predict and to assess, for example, in the context of the administration or the police. So, we've seen the use of algorithms in the Netherlands and other countries like France in order to detect fraud to welfare, and it's been shown that these algorithms would discriminate on the basis of name, location, country of origin and so on.

“Kind of putting a presumption of fraud on communities just on the basis of their names and, in the case of the Netherlands, thousands of families were wrongly accused.”

In listening to Fernandez sharing these examples, there is an echo that these are just some examples we’re told, and that the list of such injustices in the name of online safety and combatting crime go on and on and it is also clear that these issues are globally pervasive. In the UK alone, the controversial Online Safety Act launched last year has attracted a host of criticism as the preceding government essentially handed over online censorship rights to its regulator Ofcom and big tech. Meanwhile, the new government seems set to continue that course.

Along the same line was the launch of the Digital Services Act by the European Union, seeking to ensure ‘a safe and accountable online environment’. But at what cost?

As Fernandez summarised “human rights by digital rights violation can affect people's rights to freedom of expression online with some contents being censored. It can affect journalists, journalists and their sources, and it can affect the sending of some of our data on health to corporate interests.” And the list just goes on.

‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’ Martin L. King

So what can be done about this confluence of powers? Having listened to the lists of social injustice examples, a phrase from one of the great speeches given by Martin Luther King comes to mind, ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’.

“I think there is a lot of acceptance and pessimism around technology, like, it's already here and I have nothing to hide and so on,” said Fernandez. But what this attitude ignores is the fact that what may not affect one community today could well affect them tomorrow.

More broadly speaking, these rights violations are harming the notion of democracy and the values that come with it. So, how can we fight to keep our rights on digital platforms, our freedom of speech, our right to privacy, to have that private conversation with our mum about a very private moment, about life, about love, and without the state or corporations watching over our shoulder?

“I think in the grand scheme of things, those technologies don't exist for so long, right?” said Fernandez. “We could see that there are ways of dealing with our lives that are not relying on this much technology, and I think we also see a tipping point and we see the fall of some platforms like Twitter [now X] that is more and more criticised because it was bought by Elon Musk. But we see more awareness of the consequence of technology on youth, on young people, on mental health.”

Fernandez further explained that there is an aspect to challenging the inevitability of these technologies, and referring to emerging technologies such as AI and that perhaps there isn’t a real need for us to use them for more banal tasks and use cases, for something such as checking the weather. Or that perhaps there are other ways of dealing with technologies and challenging their omni-presence in our lives.

While these solutions can certainly help us reduce the pervasiveness of technology on our daily lives, more needs to be done in order to combat that confluence between states and corporate surveillance.

Thus, what follows are what seem to be some key messages on what we can do. Firstly, Fernandez explained that when developing technologies, we need to ensure we don't always “favour big players and big tech companies but favour also community alternatives.”

She said that when a new technology is sought, we must consider “how it is needed, by who it should be developed … who should fund and therefore benefit.” This screams of an urgent need for a human-centric approach, starting at the conceptualisation phase of development and moving up to design and usage phases.

Secondly, Fernandez elaborated on the need for public funding to develop technologies that can serve the needs of the public. Also, when it comes to technology regulation the work of organisations such as EDRi are important but it’s important to remember that digital rights fall into a bigger systemic issue.

With that in mind she said, “we try to work increasingly also in the intersection with other organisations working on social, environmental, racial justice right, like how do we change the conditions that are already disfavouring some groups so that we don't intervene just on technology, but on the whole.”

Telco versus big tech or much of the same?

So, what is the role of telecom players is in this space, since they are often viewed as the gatekeepers to the digital world by enabling the connectivity we live and breathe through our connected devices, day in day out.

In answering this question Fernandez continued her refreshingly frank approach. “It remains a big business with large corporate interests, so at times of course they will be critical of Big Tech because of their own interests”, she said. “So we've seen the whole discussions around network fair share and asking big tech players to pay additional money to infrastructure and telecom infrastructure, for example in Europe. But we think that that could only lead to reinforcing profit for telecom players, but an additional burden of cost for customers, for example.

“So of course, at times there will be one big player trying to counterweight Big Tech interest, but overall, they play for their own industry and company interests and not so much people.”

Referring back to the limitations of capacity and whether funding from telecom operators can support nonprofits and NGOs in the sector, Fernandez stated “it would be very difficult for us to take any money from industry, whatever the area, and we do take some corporate lobbying but they would have to respect a number of rules. And they cannot obviously make up more than a certain percentage of our money.”

So, it seems funding support from corporations is not a sustainable solution to the nonprofit sector.

Decolonising digital rights

Our conversation concluded with an initiative by the organisation that looks within the nonprofit and NGO sector. Decolonising digital rights is a project kicked off by Fernandez’ predecessor, Nani Jansen Reventlow, who believed that representation and diversity alone could not solve the issues around structural exclusion of those who are most affected by technology in a harmful way.

The initiative aimed to design a process to develop a decolonising program for the digital rights field in Europe. “Following interviews with racial and social justice activists and some digital rights activists, it became clear that a long, reflective, collective process was needed to imagine structural changes to address this problem. Hence, the decolonising process was born” reads a description on Weavingliberation, an organisation specifically created to deliver on the learnings from this initiative.

Fernandez told us the program was published and launched earlier this year following three years of hard work and collaboration with the Digital Freedom Fund (DFF) who partnered with EDRi to initiate it in 2020. This initiative sheds light on the fact that justice and the protection of rights can only begin from within and with a radical shift to the way we design and develop (be it a technology or else), looping back to a human-centred and interactive system.

Parting thoughts

Whether it is big businesses with more focus on their shareholders and profits, or policy and lawmakers, one would hope that at the end of day corporations and states are also human.

And that is very much echoed once more in the parting thoughts from Fernandez. “A message of the life that people want for their children, and you know, for the kind of planet and society we're living in, our next generations, and we do want the best for them. So, I think, in whatever work people do and advocate for, making sure that there's due consideration for people's rights like that there is participation of civil society at the table, and I think that kind of contributes to making sure that we leave a better world for children.”

In the meantime, we are grateful for organisations that make it their mission to fight and to raise awareness of totalitarian laws and issues creeping into our lives through digital funnels.