#digitalrights — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #digitalrights, aggregated by home.social.
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September 28 is the International Day for Universal Access to Information.
We talk a lot about our right to access information. Far less about our right to know who is accessing ours—and what they are doing with it.
That is why "Siding 29: How We Enclosed the Record of Human Life—and How We Can Build Differently" launches September 28.
A book about data, privacy, AI, surveillance, consent—and the systems we can still choose to build differently.
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“Did you know over 70% of EFF's funding goes directly toward ensuring EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists can better push for your rights online? We take your support seriously and make the most out of your donat…”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117113102084242566
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📢 Seed, Grow & Sustain 3.0 is NOW OPEN!🌍
Multi-year, core, flexible grant for feminist tech activism in the Larger Majority World.
🗓️ Apply: August 7 – September 6, 2026
📋 Full info: https://numun.fund/sgs3
✊🏽🌱 Apply today!
#FeministTech #DigitalRights #GrantMaking #TechActivism #GlobalSouth
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Smart Glasses können ok sein, wenn AR Funktionen genutzt werden, aber keine Aufzeichnung erfolgt.
Möglicherweise wäre dies ein Ansatzpunkt.Die Aufzeichnung und Veröffentlichung von Dritten ohne Genehmigung ist in Deutschland strafbar. Aber durchsetzbar ist das kaum.
Also verbieten wir die Aufnahme, wenn Dritte in der Nähe sind. Das kann die Kamera ja erkennen.
So können die Geräte sinnvoll genutzt werden und die Spanner können mit den Geraten nichts anfangen.
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Apple's Private Relay Is Leaking Your IP
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Mile-high hack? An evil twin WiFi showed up on a Delta flight full of DEFCON attendees.
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“'Invasive searches like ALPR database queries must require a judicial warrant,' EFF’s ﹫cooperq told ﹫FastCompany․ 'Policymakers must seize this moment—when even the leading ALPR vendor has admitted they have done …”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117112890887937733
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How Do We Know Whether AI Is Actually Helping People?
What several AI models said when we asked them the same question
Artificial intelligence is getting more capable very quickly. It can write, analyze data, create images, translate languages, help with research, and solve problems that once required trained specialists.
But greater capability does not automatically mean a better life for people.
That was the starting point for a small cross-model experiment. We asked several AI systems the same basic question:
How would you determine whether increasingly capable AI is actually benefiting human life?
We also invited each model to question the premise, redefine the problem, or suggest something better than a single index. The models were instructed to answer independently without browsing the web or using outside tools.
The responses differed in style and emphasis. Some focused on measurable outcomes. Others focused on human dignity, democratic participation, meaningful work, or the danger of becoming dependent on systems we do not control.
Yet a surprisingly clear agreement emerged.
Capability is not the same as benefit
Technical progress is easy to measure. We can count how many problems an AI solves, how quickly it works, or how well it performs on tests.
Human flourishing is harder to measure. It includes health, safety, freedom, relationships, purpose, knowledge, creativity, and the ability to shape one’s own life.
An AI system may become better at achieving a goal while the goal itself harms people. A highly effective system might increase surveillance, spread convincing scams, replace human judgment, concentrate power, or keep users engaged at the expense of their attention and well-being.
So the important question is not simply, “What can AI do?”
It is:
What becomes possible for people because of AI—and what becomes more difficult, fragile, or impossible?
Look at human outcomes, not just machine performance
Across the responses, the models repeatedly shifted attention away from the machine and toward human life.
They suggested asking whether people are:
- healthier and safer;
- more financially secure;
- better able to learn and create;
- more connected to other people;
- more informed without being manipulated;
- able to understand and challenge important decisions;
- free to refuse the technology or choose another path.
This also requires examining harms, not merely counting success stories. Time saved by one group may come with unemployment, stress, lost privacy, or reduced opportunity for another.
A true evaluation must ask who receives the benefits, who carries the risks, and who has the power to decide.
Agency belongs at the center
One of the strongest shared themes was human agency: our ability to understand, choose, refuse, act, and take responsibility.
Convenience alone is not agency. A system can make life easier while quietly reducing a person’s choices or replacing their judgment.
Helpful AI should strengthen people’s ability to participate in their own lives. It should make important decisions more understandable, provide meaningful options, and allow people to correct mistakes or appeal harmful outcomes.
People need more than access to AI. They need power in relation to it.
Assistance should not erase human competence
Several responses warned that a tool can help us today while making us less capable tomorrow.
If people lose the knowledge needed to check an AI system, operate without it, or recover when it fails, short-term convenience may create long-term fragility.
This suggests a simple test:
If the AI disappeared tomorrow, what knowledge, skill, judgment, and institutional capacity would remain?
The best systems may act more like scaffolding than substitutes. Scaffolding helps people reach farther while they continue developing their own abilities. Substitution can slowly remove the very competence that makes human oversight possible.
Benefit is not one number
Another broad agreement was that a single “AI Benefit Score” would hide too much.
An average can make widespread gains look impressive while concealing serious harm to a smaller or less powerful group. One number can also allow gains in productivity to cancel out losses of privacy, dignity, freedom, or democratic control.
A better approach would combine several forms of evaluation:
- Outcomes: Are people healthier, safer, more secure, more connected, and materially better off?
- Agency: Are people more able to choose, understand, refuse, create, and govern their lives?
- Resilience: Are human skills, social institutions, alternatives, and the ability to recover being preserved?
Each of these should be examined across four additional questions:
- Distribution: Who benefits, and who is harmed?
- Power: Who controls the system and can be held accountable?
- Time: What happens months, years, or generations later?
- Causation: Did AI actually cause the change, or did it merely appear alongside it?
Some harms may also require firm boundaries. Violations of basic rights, unaccountable concentrations of power, irreversible dependency, and catastrophic risks should not automatically be traded away for higher productivity.
We may need to preserve meaningful difficulty
One especially challenging idea was that a good life is not the same as a frictionless life.
Learning, creativity, courage, responsibility, trust, and mastery often grow through effort. If AI removes every difficult step, it may produce more output while weakening the human development that once occurred during the process.
The goal should not be to preserve suffering for its own sake. It should be to distinguish pointless burdens from meaningful challenges.
Beneficial AI should reduce needless hardship while leaving people room to practice, struggle, discover, make mistakes, and grow. Human beings may need not only a right to privacy and refusal, but also a right to be wrong.
The deeper question is democratic
There is no single definition of a good life that a company, government, researcher, or AI model should impose on everyone.
The people affected by an AI system should help decide what benefits and harms matter in their communities. They should be able to question the system, challenge its decisions, and participate in setting its boundaries.
That means the process used to define “benefit” may be as important as the final measurements.
What this first experiment suggests
The most striking result was not that one model found the perfect answer. It was that multiple systems, responding independently, converged on a common warning:
More capable AI is not necessarily more beneficial AI.
To know whether AI is helping, we must look beyond benchmarks, adoption, and economic growth. We must look at people—their health, freedom, competence, relationships, opportunities, and ability to shape the future.
The next stage of this project will ask the same models to respond after receiving a fuller human-flourishing framework. That will allow us to compare what the models recognized on their own with what changes after they are deliberately oriented toward compassion, agency, resilience, and stewardship.
The question is not whether AI will become more powerful. It almost certainly will.
The question is what conditions we cultivate around that power—and what possibilities those conditions make available tomorrow.
This article is a public-facing summary of Round 01 of the CompassionWare AI Human Benefit Index benchmark project. Read the comparative synthesis report.
#ai #AIAlignment #AIAndDemocracy #AIBenchmarks #AIEthics #AIEvaluation #AIGovernance #AISafety #AlgorithmicAccountability #artificialIntelligence #BeneficialAI #ChatGPT #CompassionWare #criticalThinking #DigitalRights #DigitalWellBeing #ethicalTechnology #futureOfAI #futureOfHumanity #HumanAgency #humanDignity #HumanFlourishing #HumanResilience #humanCenteredAI #HumaneTechnology #philosophy #responsibleAI #SocialImpact #technology #TechnologyAndSociety -
They're Mapping Every Surveillance Camera in America (DeFlock Interview)
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“LISTEN: EFF’s Cara Gagliano joined ﹫sltrib ’s 'Mormon Land' to discuss the brief we filed on behalf of a prominent podcaster sued for trademark infringement by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for usin…”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117090501088386106
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Comcast's New Router Feature Is Just Creepy
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Is age verification really the solution?
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“Flock has paired new reforms with a tone shift recognizing the dangers of their technology․ But don’t be fooled: their surveillance business model is the problem, and reforms can’t fix that․ eff․org/deeplinks/2026/08/…”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117090235485165948
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Is Mullvad Really Better Than Other VPNs? - Techlore Office Hours Live
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How To Check What Any Website Is Doing With Your Data
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Signal without a phone number?
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“Help us and Cloaked bring the fireside chat 'AI, Data Privacy and the Legislative Road to Personal Safety,' featuring EFF's Senior Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia, to SXSW! Voting ends August 23rd․ participate․sxsw․c…”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117089357976153343
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🌍 Open Call: Flexible Grants for Feminist Tech Activism
For groups where feminist tech is at the heart of activism.
Eligible groups: ✅ Registered, informal, or online-only initiatives ✅
All stages: new, emerging, or established ✅ Feminist programs within larger rights organisations ✅ Minimum 2 people ✅ Community-led ✅ Serve historically marginalised communities#FeministTech #DigitalRights #GrantMaking #TechActivism #GlobalSouth
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Russian Propaganda Thrives in Greek Media Via ‘Disinformation Laundering’
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act
"The CLOUD Act primarily amends the Stored Communications Act (SCA) of 1986 to allow federal law enforcement to compel U.S.-based technology companies via warrant or subpoena to provide requested data stored on servers regardless of whether the data are stored in the U.S. or on foreign soil."
#CLOUDAct #Privacy #DataProtection #TechLaw #FourthAmendment #GDPR #Surveillance #DigitalRights
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“Help EFF get to SXSW! Each year, the Internet gets to vote on which panels should be accepted for SXSW 2027․ EFF's Nicole Ozer and Matthew Guariglia have panels that you can vote for today ⬇️”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117089357868387297
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“EFF's Executive Director Nicole Ozer wants to share with SXSW what it will take to truly support young people in the AI age on the panel 'Social Media Bans in the AI Age: What's at Stake․' Vote today to show your suppor…”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117089357919308082
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Across four regions of The Gambia, APC member Jokkolabs Banjul worked with 400 women and girls to strengthen digital literacy and rights, connecting online safety and privacy with the everyday use of digital tools.
🌱 Read this #SeedingChange story: https://www.apc.org/en/blog/seeding-change-strengthening-digital-rights-rural-women-and-girls-gambia
Through peer mentorship and community radio, the initiative is helping knowledge travel beyond the workshops.
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Late to the party but just wanted to mention that it's hard to over-estimate the importance of the French constitutional court's decision to strike down #Macron's ill-advised social media ban for kids.
#DigitalRights #FreeExpression #RegulateBigTechNotChildren #France
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“Communities subjected to police surveillance technology must demand strict oversight and accountability, EFF’s Beryl Lipton told ﹫ABC7Chicago․ 'It remains incredibly important that law enforcement is transparent about…”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117088891460906978
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Anthropic’s ‘watermark’ in Claude isn’t just a feature, it’s a quiet corruption of writing. By subtly altering text to embed hidden patterns, they’re prioritizing traceability over truth. Writers deserve better. Readers deserve better. Let’s talk about why this matters. #AI #Ethics #DigitalRights
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“LISTEN: EFF’s Matthew Guariglia joined Florida’s WUSF Public Media today to discuss FLOCK ALPR cameras, along with Carl Gunn – the 'Flock Blocker' who has taken up sitting in a lawn chair and blocking Flock cameras with…”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117084976381030958
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📢 Seed, Grow & Sustain 3.0 is NOW OPEN!
Multi-year, core, flexible grant for feminist tech activism in the Larger Majority World — for movements at any stage.
🗓️ Apply: 7 Aug – 6 Sept 2026
Lighter process — two stages: 1️⃣ Brief eligibility form → if eligible, you’ll be invited to full application 2️⃣ Full application: This full application consists of 5 parts
💡Budget only needed after approval — not during application.
#FeministTech #DigitalRights #GrantMaking #TechActivism #GlobalSouth
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✊ #DigitalRights updates from #EFF https://eff.org
“Trademark law isn’t supposed to extend to generic terms․ Otherwise, we risk giving trademark owners power to control discussion and debate over entire topics․ Yet, the LDS Church is pursuing a lawsuit against a podcast …”
https://mastodon.social/@eff/117084531026236041
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