privacy

It’s been a great month for cyber-feminism. The #FBrape campaign succeeded in changing the social network giant’s policies on violence against women in record time. The global alarm over the NSA surveillance scandal created mass awareness over privacy and access to personal data. And Instagram launched hipster filters for videos. Perhaps not as breakthrough, but definitely encouraging of more…

A recent survey of sexual rights activists in India shows that most consider the internet an integral part of their activism. Tangled, Like Wool explores several intertwined questions arising from this: What does the internet bring to sexual rights activism? Do the online and the offline complement each other in this kind of activism? How does keeping the internet free and open strengthen…

What does it mean to use the internet freely and fully? What freedom do you have to express who you are, how you live your life, what you desire, dream and believe in on the internet? And how safely can you communicate, contribute, exist, navigate and be in the spaces online that can so powerfully connect you to communities and knowledges that build our sense of self? This article written by…

From 17 to 18 June 2013 I took part in the conference on online freedom known as Freedom Online. This conference, carrying the same name of the coalition behind it, highlighted the continent in which it was hosted. In the midst of the international storm about surveillance and censorship, our specific focus was online freedom in Africa and the Arab world as Tunisia, like all of the Maghreb, has…

It was a bit like ping-pong - reporters, activists, and representatives from civil society organisations in a hot debate on privacy in Facebook. Some pointed out how Facebook (FB) from its inception is designed to encourage giving up your innermost secrets – or at least your relationship status. That privacy configurations change frequently on FB and it's hard to keep up or understand the…

The "Digital World 2012 - Knowledge to Prosperity conference":http://www.digitalworld.org.bd in Dhaka, Bangladesh 6-8 December was an amazing mashup of private sector, government, education, and civil society united in their interest in ICT for development. As coordinator of APC's "End violence: Women's rights and safety online project":…

The 2012 "Take Back the Tech! campaign":https://www.takebackthetech.net/, a collaborative campaign that takes place annually during the "16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence":http://16dayscwgl.rutgers.edu/, featured 16 stories for 16 days. Each of these stories presented a different way how…

This selection of tweets circulated during the 2012 Take Back the Tech! campaign spotlights some of the key issues addressed during the 16 Days as well as relevant and provocative resources regarding violence against women and technologies.

As I write, our online campaign: "respect online, respect offline" which, for 16 days, highlighted violence against women and girls in line with the campaign Take Back the Tech! inviting women and girls to use ICT to denounce violence, has just come to an end. But I realize that our campaign has been disrupted by the violence in my country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, even though it has not…

Online harassment has become incredibly common for women around the world. Perpetrators of this violence act without fear of recourse, as anonymity protects them, and law does not limit their hate speech. Many women leave the online world out of fear that this violence will affect them in the offline world. But there are strategies that exist for women online activists to use to protect…