Technologies that map women’s bodies and reproductive choices are a site of patriarchal control and surveillance while simultaneously creating an illusion of choice or autonomy for users. This report recognizes and examines the ways in which the absence of safeguards for sensitive and personal data and information disproportionately targets women. The digital moment is fraught with the dangers of women losing control over their bodies to the technological networks of surveillance, even as limitations are placed on their access to these technologies that purportedly enable autonomy. Concurrently, gender-based cyberviolence has emerged in new ways to recreate insecurity in women's interconnected digital and physical lives.
This report is IT for Change's contribution towards the final report formulated by the United Nations Office of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy (SRP) for the Human Rights Council in March 2020. It recommends that special attention should be directed towards the gendered aspects of state surveillance, dataveillance in the platform economy, workplace, social and community surveillance and the encryption-decryption debate.
