Protect Children’s Privacy Online: Daily Brief

Governments of 49 of the world’s most populous countries harmed children’s rights by endorsing online learning products during Covid-19 school closures without adequately protecting children’s privacy. Most education technology products installed trackers that trailed children outside of their virtual classrooms and across the internet, over time. Some invisibly tagged and fingerprinted children in ways that were impossible to avoid or erase, without throwing the child's device away in the trash. Children, parents, and teachers were largely kept in the dark. But even if they had known what was going on, they had no choice: children had to either use these products and pay for it with their data privacy, or be marked as absent and drop out of school during Covid-19. Children shouldn’t be compelled to give up their privacy to learn.

The Uganda High Court has overturned the suspension of Chapter Four, a prominent legal aid organization. On August 10, 2021, the National Bureau for Non-governmental Organizations indefinitely suspended 54 civil society groups, including Chapter Four, on a range of grounds. Chapter Four told HRW that the suspension created an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in the sector. There’s an urgent need to end unjustified restrictions on civil society groups in Uganda.

As part of a larger wave of recent attacks against transgender youth in the United States, Oklahoma’s legislature has passed a bill that would ban transgender students from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity. The bill is expected to be signed into law later this week. Senate Bill 615 would require students in the state’s public schools to use restrooms according to the sex on their birth certificate, barring transgender girls from using female bathrooms, and transgender boys from using male bathrooms. Bathroom bans are known to worsen harassment against transgender children, which effectively “out” them when they are forced to implicitly disclose their transgender status through their bathroom usage.

In the past decade, thousands of migrant workers have died in unexplained circumstances in Qatar, while many more have faced other serious abuses while literally building the FIFA 2022 World Cup. Many have not received any redress. Now, six months before the tournament kicks off, FIFA and Qatari authorities need to stop making excuses and start providing remedy for the migrant workers harmed and their families.

Moldovan authorities are segregating Romani refugees, housing them separately from others fleeing the war in Ukraine. Amid pervasive discriminatory attitudes toward Roma, government authorities have permitted and, in some cases, directed staff and volunteers to deny Romani refugees housing at government-run facilities. “Regardless of the economic and social problems Moldova faces, the government has a responsibility to ensure that refugees are not discriminated against on the basis of ethnicity,” said Anastasiia Kroupe, assistant Europe and Central Asia researcher at HRW.

And finally, in an important step for justice, four high-ranking US congress members called on the chief executives of YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and Meta (formerly Facebook) to preserve and archive content on their platforms that might be evidence of war crimes in Ukraine. HRW and other human rights groups have called on social media companies to preserve photos, videos and other content that can be used by researchers and journalists in documenting and investigating abuses during conflict.