Why do digital rights need to be identified, disseminated and protected?

All affirmations of rights are born out of great historical upheavals. They transform the perspective of social wholes, leading millions of people to reorganise and retune their values. If during the last century the first world war brought about women's suffrage and the second the welfare state, it was because the two great wars fundamentally changed the consensual values of society.

The pandemic we are still living through is an equivalent shock in everything that touches on the way we understand the digital, its importance and the values that should guide its regulation. One only has to listen to the networks of teachers and professors, teleworking teams in companies, health workers themselves or sociological surveys to realise that there has been a reordering of the hierarchy of values. Citizens are demanding more from the Internet because their lives have been - and will continue to be - conveyed through the Internet in a new way.

For years and in various fields, there have already been important initiatives, some of them of a regulatory nature, which demonstrate the increasingly widespread concern for the recognition and regulation of citizens' rights in the digital environment. This concern has grown strongly over the last three years. In 2018-19 due to a series of scandals related to unethical practices of technology companies and in 2020 because of the pandemic, which overnight put the internet at the centre of our lives, making the problems to be solved even more evident.

Due to rapid technological evolution and globalisation, a stronger and more coherent regulatory framework is needed to build trust and allow the digital economy to develop. But European culture is very old and therefore slow to change laws or enact new codes, which also have to follow, not precede, a social awareness that demands such changes.

The World Economic Forum already defines digital rights as human rights in the Internet age, identifying, for example, that the rights to online privacy and freedom of expression are extensions of the rights set out in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

But as experience tells us, the nature of digitisation prevents many widely recognised rights from being effectively enforced when it comes to the digital environment.

The first serious approximation at the European level took place with Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.

However, when it comes to citizens' rights in the digital environment beyond the protection of their data, the situation is still in its infancy. Even in the case of personal data protection, breaches are daily occurrences. In the case of vulnerable groups, the work to be done is even more urgent and necessary.

The Spanish government has just presented the Charter of Digital Rights. A pioneering initiative created to serve as a compass for legislative initiatives from now on, and which seeks to safeguard the rule of law in the complicated process of the more than necessary digitalisation. This charter is undoubtedly a milestone and a major step forward, but we need to keep working.

For this reason, we need the commitment of all actors to move forward with initiatives that strengthen and consolidate a scenario for the effective promotion and recognition of digital citizenship rights. All of this, from a European perspective, as only by taking this perspective into account will it be possible to make effective progress in the recognition of digital rights.

In this context, it seems clear that initiatives aimed at boosting and accelerating awareness and commitment to citizens' digital rights can be a key instrument for consolidating a new right in a European scenario that responds to the shortcomings detected and reinforces trust in the digital environment. The first step, let us remember, is for society to be aware of the problem.

This "new field" of digital rights encompasses legislative issues and enforcement of effective judicial protection, but also business and organisational policy issues, ranging from commitment to truthfulness of information and cyber-bullying, to systems of participation, transparency in procedures and the relationship between companies and their customers.

The aim must be to protect the moral integrity of the digital citizen and his or her personal identity, whatever the conditions, while reinforcing the concepts of citizen sovereignty and digital dignity in the European virtual environment.

At the Hermes Institute Foundation, dedicated to identifying, disseminating and defending digital citizenship rights, we would like to share, for your reflection, a series of rights and principles that we consider essential to start talking about digital democracy.

- Universality: everyone must have access to everything (public information, public services...).
- Non-exclusion: those who do not wish to access cannot be excluded (it cannot be compulsory to be connected in order to access the state, opportunities, public services, etc.).
- Equality in access: access cannot be conditioned either by technological complexity or by options that force citizens to become clients or users of particular companies (for example, we cannot ask citizens to update and configure Java, handle and understand security certificates and install a particular old and not necessarily accessible version of a browser in order to identify themselves digitally to the administration).
- Abundance (vs. artificial scarcity): where it is possible to universalise access, any system that artificially imposes scarcity for some particular benefit should be avoided... be it to avoid modifying an administrative procedure, to generate extra income or profit without adding services, etc. For example in the above case, inclusive solutions accessible to all are possible.
- Defence of personal, collective and organisational sovereignty. This principle informs everything from the citizen's right to ownership of the data they generate in their relationship with administrations, companies, etc. to the right to know when they operate, demand auditing and challenge the outcome in automated decision-making processes.
- Moral integrity of the individual linked to digital identity. This principle is the one that on the one hand serves to recognise personal dignity in the digital sphere, and on the other, anonymity with a regulation that guarantees that anonymity does not mean impunity when it comes to violating the moral integrity of others (sexual cyberbullying, bullying, personality assassination, identity theft, etc.).

Enrique Goñi. President of the Hermes Institute