The Privacy Mission

CHAPTER 1Our Human Rights Online

What does the term digital rights mean to you? Have you ever stopped to consider your rights in the online world and what those might (or might not!) be? Do you equate them with your human rights? If not, then now is the time to start, because there is no such thing as just digital rights. The lines between our physical and digital selves have blurred and that means our rights in a digital world are simply our human rights. You cannot separate the two; they are intrinsically linked. A quick history lesson into the origin of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was put in place in 1948, will show you why.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in the aftermath of World War II, when there was a strong focus on the social levers and mechanisms that had allowed Hitler to seize power and for Nazism to take root in Germany. The intention of this declaration was to put protections in place for both individuals and society, to mitigate against potential threats like this going into the future.

This was largely a mantle taken up by Western democracies, with other countries and cultures taking longer to go down the same path. In these Western democracies, there was very much a consensus that individual human rights were important to allow individuals and societies to push back against governments that might be sliding down a path towards totalitarian rule. The most important right ...