Privacy and Social Movements

Privacy is an often controversial, misunderstood, and underestimated concept, including on purpose by actors like governments or the Silicon Valley giants of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (GAFA). Unfortunately, due to today's technologies, the potential for intrusions into personal privacy have increased exponentially. Even though there are different laws that protect privacy (i.e. GDPR) what is considered to be private by individuals and what is legally protected as private can differ. Different apps have different privacy policies, which leads to the protection of usually limited types of information, but not others. This situation is dangerous for social movements. Hackers and academics have been developing tools like Tor and Signal to encrypt our messages, and protect the right to privacy and anonymity. However, so much more needs to be done, both from a technical perspective, and through advocacy. Individuals, NGOs, activists: Everyone is a potential target of surveillance. In this paper we discuss the impact of privacy violations on social movements and the tools for encrypted messaging currently used by social movements. We show that the misunderstandings around privacy by users and the causes that prevent the developing of better tools for social movements.