Victory in Geneva! The Right to Digital Integrity incorporated into the constitution
People in Geneva voted 94% in favour of the Right to Digital Integrity and it’s bigger than privacy…
People in Geneva voted 94% in favour of the Right to Digital Integrity and it’s bigger than privacy…
A whopping 94% of voters in Geneva have just voted for protecting the individual against abusive data processing and for the right to an offline life. The Right to Digital Integrity is now being incorporated into the constitution of the canton of Geneva, Switzerland.
Languages: Türkçe
94% of voters in the Swiss Canton of Geneva voted in favour of including digital integrity into their constitution.
Where does Nym fit into all this? Apart from being headquartered in Switzerland, Nym COO Alexis Roussel has been campaigning for the right to digital integrity for years, with the understanding that privacy is only one small part of what is at stake when our core infrastructures are built with a surveillance business model.
There are three important lessons that can be learned from this historical moment:
- People understand that the state of the digital world today is very worrying
- People do not like to have the details about them and their lives traded on open markets
- Privacy is not the primary concern…
…let’s delve into that last point a bit as it contains important lessons for all of us building privacy enhancing technologies!
Privacy was not the core argument
For many years now, activists, progressive technologists and regulators have been working hard to try and protect privacy in the digital world. But after a few decades of this approach, it is clear that privacy is just one symptom of the deeper problem of a surveillance-driven business model at the core of the internet.
For ordinary people, there is much more at stake in the digitisation of life than privacy. When people are turned into data and traded on open markets, this threatens people’s security, creates new forms of exclusion and inequality, leads to job loss, persecution, mental health issues and more. These are the direct effects of generalised systems that treat our digital selves with far less respect and consideration as our physical selves.
What is groundbreaking about the results of the Geneva constitutional amendment was that it did not foreground privacy per se. Instead it was a recognition of a much larger fact: that our digital selves are deserving of the same levels of recognition and protection as our physical selves, from both administrative, state and commercial intrusion. Because our digital lives have a very real impact.
The key thing that drove these results was that the amendment to the Geneva constitution was not presented as a right to privacy. Instead, it was presented as the right to digital integrity, emphasising protection against the abusive processing of data related to a person’s digital life, the right to digital security, the right to an offline life and the right to be forgotten. This resonated far wider with people’s experiences of the effects of digital surveillance than the concept of privacy.
This is a lesson for all of us building privacy preserving technologies: what is at stake is far bigger than privacy and ordinary people recognise this.
Many of us in the privacy technology ecosystem are already putting effort into the narrative work needed in order to articulate an empowering alternative vision for our digital future: from Lunarpunk, to self-sovereignty, to the post-web and Digital Integrity.
The aim of this narrative work is to articulate a vision that recognises the importance of people being able to determine their own terms of engagement with others.
Keen to discuss and work with others on this in the Nym ecosystem?
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What next?
Several other cantons of Switzerland are now lining up to adopt similar amendments to their constitutions as this recognition of the need for digital integrity is gaining momentum.
View the results and read the original amendment in French. Translation:
“The amendment proposed by Constitutional Law 12945 aims to introduce a fundamental right aimed at protect the digital integrity of citizens, mainly in the context of their relations with the public administrations.
This fundamental right enshrines principles related to integrity, which are in particular the right to be protected against the abusive processing of data related to their digital life, the right to digital security, the right to an offline life and the right to be forgotten.
It obliges the State, in the context of data processing personnel for which it is responsible, to ensure a level adequate protection, in particular if this treatment is carried out in foreign jurisdictions.
This constitutional law commits the State on the ground of digital inclusion in order to support citizens and citizens in the digital revolution and to raise their awareness issues related to digitization. It invites the State of Geneva to play an active role in the development of Swiss digital sovereignty. Since it concerns a modification of the constitution of the Republic and canton of Geneva, of October 14, 2012, the vote of the electorate is compulsory.”
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