Digital security
A damning new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, raises alarm about the rise of the digital welfare state, which uses data and technologies to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish the poor. The report, recently presented to the UN General Assembly, covers a range of uses of digital technologies for welfare systems – digital identification, automated programmes to assess eligibility and calculation ...
As an organisation that has worked at the intersections of human rights and technology for nearly three decades and fully recognises the critical importance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the fundamental right to protest, we welcome the focus of the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights on this topic. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the online and offline dimensions of human rights in the context of assemblies, including peaceful protest...
APC's 2018 Annual Report offers an engaging dive into one year in the network's life. However, as comprehensive as it is, it is just a sample of the multifaceted and tireless work we all do at APC. As APC's executive director Chat Garcia Ramilo said in her introduction to this report, it is a compendium of "stories about how APC collectively strives for change," from what Bishakha Dat...
Last week it was revealed that the governments of the US, UK and Australia are pressuring Facebook to "not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety and without including a means for lawful access to the content of communications to protect our citizens." APC joined over a hundred civil socie...
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, The organizations below write today to encourage you, in no uncertain terms, to continue increasing the end-to-end security across Facebook’s messaging services. We have seen requests from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australian governments asking you to suspend these plans “until [Facebook] can guarantee the added privacy does not reduce public safety”. We ...
Civil society actors, women’s rights and sexual rights advocates have the capacity to confidently use the internet and ICTs, and engage critically in their development. This is a compendium of the highlights from APC's Annual Report for 2018. Disco-tech foregrounded disability and accessibility to the internet "Disability is not about the person, it’s about the interaction between the ...
The Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) serves as a multistakeholder platform for discussion, exchange and collaboration around internet governance issues at the regional level. At the 10th annual APrIGF, held on 16-19 July 2019 in Vladivostok, Russia, APC and its members played a key role, organising, moderating and speaking at a range of plenary sessions and workshops thr...
Research ICT Africa (RIA) and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) welcome this opportunity to jointly submit written comments on the South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC) Discussion Paper 149 on Sexual Offences: Pornography and Children, published in April 2019. The Discussion Paper solicits views and comments on proposed amendments to the legislative framework that curre...
In late 2018, the UN General Assembly's First Committee established two parallel processes to discuss responsible state behaviour in cyberspace: the UN Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and the Open Ended Working Group (OEWG). The outcomes of these processes may end up having a significant influence on trends and policies in cybersecurity globally, with implications for human rights. This exp...
Among human rights defenders (HRDs), those working on land, indigenous peoples’ and environmental rights are the most targeted group. Over 200 environmental HRDs were killed in 2017 alone, 60% of them in Latin America. This situation was the motivation behind the session “Collective digital security strategies for environmental HRDs” at this year’s Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia,...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2019
Unless otherwise stated, content on the APC website is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)