Human rights and ICTs
The publication “Human Rights in the Age of Platforms”, published by the MIT Press in November 2019, examines the human rights implications of today's platform society. “Today such companies as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter play an increasingly important role in how users form and express opinions, encounter information, debate, disagree, mobilize, and maintain their privacy. What are the human rights implications of an online domain managed by privately owned platform...
The African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms (AfDec) Coalition has set 2020 as the year for robust advocacy for an open and free internet as well as strategic promotion of online human rights in Africa. AfDec’s work is hinged on the promotion of the 13 principles of the African Declaration. The Coalition is a Pan-African initiative aimed at promoting principles of openness in internet policy formulation and implementation. The Declaration also seeks to enhance online rights on...
The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) welcomes the judgment of the Supreme Court of India, which held that the indefinite imposition of internet shutdowns is unconstitutional. In its judgement on 10 January 2020, the Court directed the government to review all orders relating to internet shutdowns within one week. The Court also directed the government to put in the public domai...
On 8 January 2020, Privacy International issued an open letter to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., asking Google to “take action against exploitative pre-installed software on Android devices.” The letter is both a caution and a call to action against exploitation of smartphone users by manufacturers who put profit over privacy by pre-installing apps, known as “b...
What does your hate speech monster look like? This is the question posed in a video we have produced as part of our project "Challenging hate narratives and violations of freedom of religion and expression online in Asia". Our #ChallengeHateSpeech project aims to contribute to the efforts made by movements pushing back against hate speech through different strategies. These inclu...
Dear Mr. Pichai, We, the undersigned, agree with you: privacy cannot be a luxury offered only to those people who can afford it. And yet, Android Partners – who use the Android trademark and branding – are manufacturing devices that contain pre-installed apps that cannot be deleted (often known as "bloatware"), which can leave users vulnerable to their data being collected, shared and expos...
The Association for Progressive Communications welcomes the focus of the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance on the acute and structural threats that new information technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), pose to the rights to non-discrimination and racial equality, human rights principles and standards,...
The annual Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) report has come to be an important publication for APC, as each year the theme reflects a topic or issue of great relevance for the network. This year’s theme of “Artificial intelligence: Human rights, social justice and development” was extremely timely, as evidenced by the high number of panels and sessions that took place at the In...
The undersigning civil society organisations express our concern over the global trend of persecuting digital rights defenders – including security researchers and trainers who act to protect and promote human rights. We demand the strong protection of their work and their recognition as human rights defenders. Either through laws that criminalise their activity or through judicial persecutio...
A range of spyware vendors including Italian Hacking Team, the Anglo-German Gamma Group, and Israeli’s NSO Group, have found a ready market in authoritarian and repressive governments in Africa and elsewhere. Similarly, systematic propaganda campaigns designed by meddlesome actors – including government agents and ambitious data analytics companies such as Cambridge Analytica working on beh...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2019
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