Digital security
For Take Back the Tech! (TBTT), the internet is a space for play, exploration, experimentation and learning, as well as a vital political space of free association and expression. That’s why the APC Women's Rights Programme created a series of online sharing sessions so that TBTT campaigners and other curious cyberfeminists from all over the world could participate, create and put their knowledge into action to occupy the internet creatively. Take Back the Tech! Feminist Learning Circles we...
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 “bloatware”, on low-cost devices. The campaign on privacy safeguards for users of low-cost technolog...
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...
On Friday 22 and Saturday 23 November 2019, GreenNet's website and most of our online services, including most of our customers’ websites, went offline for several hours on two occasions. Our technicians became aware of the outage on Friday lunchtime and worked remotely and at our data centre until the small hours of Saturday morning to identify the fault and restore access to websites and em...
In his first address at the high level opening of the UN General Assembly in 2017, Secretary-General António Guterres highlighted escalating cybersecurity threats as a leading threat to international security. In addition to the threat of cyberwar, cyberattacks have resulted in the closure of hospitals, have taken electrical grids offline, brought major cities to a standstill, and even affecte...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is now receiving unprecedented global attention as it finds widespread practical application in multiple spheres of activity. But what are the human rights, social justice and development implications of AI when used in areas such as health, education and social services, or in building “smart cities”? How does algorithmic decision making impact on marginalised ...
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 wel...
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 on...
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...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2019
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