Digital Privacy Rights

We hold these truths to be self-evident in the digital age: that all internet users are endowed with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are privacy, data sovereignty, and the freedom from surveillance.

The internet was built as a tool for human communication and liberation. Over the past two decades, it has been transformed into a surveillance apparatus that commodifies human behavior on an unprecedented scale. This transformation was not inevitable—it was a choice made by corporations and enabled by our collective inaction.

It's time to choose differently.

Every person has the right to browse, communicate, and transact online without being identified, tracked, or profiled.

Anonymity is not suspicious. Throughout human history, anonymous speech has been essential for political dissent, whistleblowing, and personal exploration. The Federalist Papers were published anonymously. So were countless works of literature, philosophy, and journalism that shaped our world.

The default state of browsing the web should be anonymous. Identification should be explicit, consensual, and purposeful—not the baseline assumption.

Every person owns their personal data. No entity may collect, store, process, or sell personal data without explicit, informed, and revocable consent.

Your data is yours. It's not a "resource" for companies to extract. It's not a "byproduct" of using services. It's an extension of your identity, and you have the absolute right to control it.

"Consent" buried in 50-page terms of service is not consent. "Accept all cookies" as the default option is not consent. True consent means:

• Clear, plain-language explanation of what data is collected
• Specific purposes for each data type
• Equal ease of accepting or declining
• Revocation at any time with immediate effect
• No penalty for declining (service works without data collection)

Every person has the right to know what data is collected about them, who has access to it, how it is used, and where it is sold.

Transparency is non-negotiable. If a company collects data about you, you have the right to:

• Access the complete record of your data
• Know every entity that has received your data
• Understand the inferences made about you
• Challenge and correct inaccuracies
• Request complete deletion

The surveillance economy thrives in darkness. Data brokers operate in shadows, building profiles from hundreds of sources. This must end. Every person deserves to know their "shadow profile."

Every person has the right to request the permanent deletion of their personal data from any system that holds it.

The past should not haunt forever. People change. Circumstances change. Information that was once public may become harmful. The ability to start fresh is fundamental to human dignity.

Deletion means deletion—not archiving, not flagging as "inactive," not keeping "for legal purposes." When you request deletion, every copy of your data should be purged from every system.

Every person has the right to have their personal data protected with state-of-the-art security measures.

If you collect data, you must protect it. Data breaches are not acceptable costs of doing business. They are failures of responsibility. Companies that cannot secure data should not collect it.

• Encryption at rest and in transit should be mandatory
• Data minimization: only collect what's necessary
• Regular security audits and penetration testing
• Immediate breach notification (hours, not months)
• Meaningful penalties for negligence

Every person has the right to use strong encryption without backdoors, and to communicate privately without government or corporate surveillance.

Encryption is not a crime. End-to-end encryption is the digital equivalent of a sealed envelope. Governments that demand "backdoors" for law enforcement are demanding the abolition of private communication.

There is no such thing as a backdoor that only "good guys" can use. Every vulnerability created for law enforcement is a vulnerability for criminals, foreign adversaries, and oppressive regimes.

Every person has the right to understand and challenge algorithmic decisions that affect their lives.

Algorithms are not neutral. They encode the biases of their creators and the data they're trained on. When algorithms determine credit scores, job opportunities, insurance rates, or criminal sentencing, people deserve to know how and why.

• Right to know when an algorithm is making decisions about you
• Right to a human review of significant algorithmic decisions
• Right to explanation of algorithmic logic
• Right to contest and appeal algorithmic decisions

These rights will not be granted—they must be demanded. Change requires action at every level:

These organizations are leading the fight for digital rights: