"We're Still Watching You": Data Privacy, Gender, and the Fight for Democratic Space
Our democratic rights increasingly reside in the digital space and so do the tools used to take them away. Who is most affected when surveillance, data collection, and AI-generated abuse are turned against citizens? And what does digital safety even mean when the images being shared of you aren't real? Partnerships for Integrity (P4I) convened three experts working on these questions every day, in very different contexts and ways, to find out.
The panel brought together Chipo Karwi of the Digital Society of Africa, whose work provides grassroots digital protection to activists, journalists, and human rights defenders in Zimbabwe and across the Southern African region; Saijai Liangpunsakul, Founder and CEO of Stop Online Harm, a women-led organization ending technology-facilitated gender-based violence across Southeast Asia; and Rebecca Williams, Director of Strategy for Privacy and Data Governance at the ACLU. Moderated by P4I Co-Founder Meredith Applegate, the conversation moved from Harare to Yangon to Washington — and kept landing on the same conclusion: surveillance is never gender-neutral.
Ordinary Systems, Gendered Harms
The most alarming threats rarely announce themselves as such. They are embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life. In much of Africa, mandatory SIM card registration links every phone to a name, address, and identity document — data that flows readily to state actors. "The impact becomes gendered in how the information is weaponized," Chipo explained. Attacks on women draw on allegations about sexuality, morality, relationships, parenting, and appearance. "These tactics end up removing a woman from public participation, or active political and civic spaces."
In the United States, Rebecca pointed to surveillance of people seeking reproductive healthcare across state lines — facilitated by the same telecom and social media infrastructure people rely on to communicate — and to proposed voter ID legislation requiring the name on your license to match your birth certificate. Women who changed their names at marriage are the largest group at risk of disenfranchisement.
And in Myanmar, the military has turned exile itself into a target. Women activists who fled after the coup find their images captured and posted to Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of followers. "It sends a signal to any woman who would like to speak out: this could be you," Saijai said. "It creates an atmosphere that even though you already left the country, you can still be followed. We're still watching you, beyond the borders."
AI Has Changed the Attack — Faster Than Anyone Can Respond
All three panelists described a step change in the past two years. Harassment that once relied on crude Photoshop and searchable keywords has shifted to AI-generated images that are personalized, produced at scale, and shared at speed. "In the past, it was quite difficult to create something really personalized to that person," Saijai noted. "With AI and deepfakes, you can create a really personalized attack toward that person, at scale."
Chipo's organization has responded by treating digital safety as organizational and community resilience: trusted verification channels established before a crisis, clear protocols for who confirms authenticity and who speaks publicly, and incident response that covers evidence preservation, legal assistance, psychosocial care, and physical protection — not just the takedown. "It should address the wider effects of the attack, not just look at how to stop it."
Rebecca underscored the legal vacuum: even a celebrity of Scarlett Johansson's stature relied on public pressure rather than the courts when her voice was imitated. "These are tools that don't necessarily have a legal framework to provide women with recourse — and the harms are disproportionately happening to women." Saijai pushed the point further upstream: laws increasingly require deepfake images to be taken down, but almost nowhere regulates the tools that generate them in the first place.
When "Protection" Laws Become Weapons
Perhaps the most sobering thread of the discussion: data protection and cybersecurity laws — nominally written to protect citizens — are being turned against them. In Zimbabwe, a combined cybersecurity and cybercrimes act was used to arrest a journalist over messages intercepted after he interviewed a political figure. "It's essentially a guise," Chipo said. "We have a data protection law — but the law cannot be used by the ordinary citizen to challenge powerful institutions."
In Myanmar, cybersecurity legislation criminalizes VPN use — the very tool citizens need to reach blocked news and social media — with police empowered to search phones at checkpoints and jail people for six months. And in the US, Rebecca described a quieter irony: privacy laws that push companies to centralize the profiles they hold on users have created "a really nice package for law enforcement, subpoenas, and hackers — it wouldn't have been as available, as organized, or as persistent before these laws."
Content, Not Context
Why do platforms keep failing the women who report abuse? Because moderation systems see content, not context. A conversation in Zimbabwe may weave together English, Shona, Ndebele, and local slang; a threat rarely says "let's harm this woman" outright, but functions locally as exactly that. Chipo described a helpline case in which a woman repeatedly reported abusive content, received automated rejections, and was left to explain a culturally specific threat through a form — in English — while screenshots spread into private groups and the risk turned physical.
"Tech companies look into content, not context," Saijai said. Ten messages that each pass community standards can together constitute severe harassment. AI-driven moderation compounds the problem: by the time a system learns that a strawberry emoji signals "fake" or a buffalo means "stupid" in Thai harassment campaigns, the attackers have moved on to new symbols. Even the definition of a non-consensual image is cultural — for some women, an image without a hijab is itself a profound violation that no global standard recognizes.
What Needs to Change
Asked what actions would make a real difference now, the panelists converged on prevention over reaction:
Invest before the crisis. "Preventive support is more important than reactive support," Chipo argued — training, preparedness, and long-term accompaniment rather than only emergency response.
Design safety into the product. Saijai pointed to child-safety design regulation as a model: "We cannot just wait for policy. What tech companies can do quickly and easily is think in terms of design to ensure the safety of women when they use the platform."
Get creative with the law. Rebecca urged advocates to push existing consumer protection law as far as it will go — and to seize unexpected openings, like community backlash against data center construction: "NIMBY for good."
Make platforms responsible for survivors. Saijai described a young woman from Shan State who called the Online Ambulance contemplating suicide after her image was shared online — on a platform she wasn't even on. "Why does it come to us, a small organization, to clean up this mess? Why aren't tech companies investing resources into supporting survivors?"
The Overarching Theme: Safety — and Joy
Asked to describe what a truly democratic digital space would feel like for women, the panelists' answers were strikingly simple. For Rebecca: "choice and agency — on the platform, and a say in the platform's design." For Chipo: "being able to speak, organize, report, campaign, and seek help without carrying that expected burden of sexualized abuse, surveillance, or retaliation." And for Saijai: "safety, and also joy."
That last word may be the one worth holding onto. A democratic digital space is not merely the absence of harm — it is the presence of connection, participation, and delight. As Meredith noted in closing, the digital space is, after all, how this panel found each other. The work ahead is making sure that remains true for every woman who wants to speak.
