Issues around gender and privacy are multiple and diverse. This section offers an overview of some of the topics we have been exploring.

Whose privacy are we fighting for when we say we defend the right to privacy? Talking about privacy in the abstract – as if we all benefit from the same rights, as if we are all equal – means taking the risk of defending the rights of only the most privileged ones in society – with privilege coming in different forms from having a voice to be heard to socio-economic status.

Surveillance and data exploitation are key issues in understanding mechanism of oppression over LGBTIQ+ people. For instance, patriarchy needs the rigid categorisation of ID systems to impose a binary perspective of gender, welfare programmes participate in the control and constant monitoring of populations in vulnerable situations, data exploitation contributes to the expectation that people should look and act a certain way and seeks to perpetuate traditional gender roles in society and social surveillance limits the opportunities of LGBTIQ+ people.

And while patriarchy and systems of oppressions need surveillance, the reverse is true as well. Surveillance and data exploitation are about categorisation. They are about putting individuals in boxes, tagging them so they become easier to process. So, when we carry IDs – with an assigned gender on them – or when we get married – and therefore register our family as a unit in the eyes of the state – we become processable.

In a world where decision-making led by artificial intelligence will more and more influence our lives and our chances to get job, to access healthcare or for our behaviours to be monitored, and where the internet of things is breaching the divide between the internet and the physical world, LGBTIQ+ people will be confronted to patriarchal oppression in even more pervasive way then they already are.  

It is essential that those fighting for LGBTIQ+ rights reclaim the right to privacy. Privacy should be part of their toolbox. It should be the right that allows us to have agency, to control our identity, to speak our mind safely and securely, the right to express ourselves without having a name and face attached to what we say, the right that prevents others from sharing images of us without our consent.

But privacy is also the right that allows us to explore our sexual identity, like in India where privacy – once recognised as a fundamental right in the constitution – allowed the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

It is time for a reclaiming of privacy that will empower LGBTIQ+ people.

It is time for privacy to become a tool to smash patriarchy and so it’s time to ask ourselves what privacy will look like in a post-patriarchal world.

Privacy International produces new research on the topic of gender, surveillance and technology and LGBTIQ+ rights are at the core of this work. As well as producing our own research, we also support the research conducted by our network of partner organisations on those very issues.

Privacy International also engages with organisations working on the frontline to support LGBTIQ+ individuals across the world. We are here to provide them with support and resources on a wide range of issues.