🚨Europe's Surveillance Dilemma: HDRI Reveals How to Protect Democracy from Digital Overreach

🚨Is Europe turning digital tools into democratic threats? HDRI's latest Thematic Index on Surveillance presents how digital surveillance is rapidly expanding across Europe, framed as essential for security but increasingly threatening civic space, privacy, and participation. 📊This research analyzes France and Germany's normalization of intrusive tools like drone monitoring and metadata retention against Estonia's transparency model, using a 10-level "Levels of Digital Surveillance" framework to assess risks from identity systems to encrypted access. It proposes EU-wide reforms: banning high-risk practices (e.g., real-time facial recognition), mandatory human rights impact assessments, public registers, and protections for digital civic spaces to align surveillance with democratic principles.

Our 10-level "Levels of Digital Surveillance" framework maps the risks from basic IDs to encrypted backdoors and spotlights real fixes:

✅ Ban real-time facial recognition

✅ Mandate public human rights impact assessments

✅ Protect digital spaces as civic zones

Authored by Lucas Alfredo Tan (University of Manchester, BA Social Anthropology & Sociology), and edited by Glyre Faeldonia (MSc Global Development).

Check the full report below👇