Following the tightening of restrictions in several countries,... Skyline International publishes report on controls and mechanisms for monitoring social media

Stockholm - Skyline International for Human Rights states that the biggest challenges currently facing the right to freely use social networking sites are the broad laws passed by many countries that criminalize and restrict individuals from using these sites, as the provisions of these laws have become tools of law enforcement rather than of protection.

In this regard, Skyline asserts that it has become effortless to access personal data through phones, computers connected to the Internet through specific applications. Accordingly, individuals can be easily tracked through their digital data. Thus, we can say that online privacy has become fictional and impossible to maintain.

Skyline points out that privacy and personal data have become material that is either used commercially for marketing purposes or monitored by government agencies, or is subject to theft and exploitation for purposes that harm its owners.

In addition, "Skyline" states that despite the claims made by countries and social media companies about the importance of protecting user data, these claims remain questionable in reality, as they reserve the right to modify or publish content and archive it for a certain period of time, all of which falls within the realm of hacking, loss of information security, and invasion of privacy for advertising, commercial, and security purposes.

The Human Rights Foundation Skyline emphasizes that the current data protection provisions of international law have only casually protected this right and have not addressed the problem of technological development and its impact on the privacy of user data. This problem has recently become more acute, especially given the insistence of some countries to enact laws that unjustifiably monitor the content of individuals and sometimes criminalize their publications for political purposes.

In its report, "Skyline" concludes that all governmental and international parties should begin to protect individuals' rights to use social networking sites and limit control over those sites, based on a common rule that individuals' data must be protected, and work to find real mechanisms to address the danger of countries' efforts to monitor their people' content.

Skyline also calls for the development of a clear and specific strategy in dealing with the privacy and confidentiality of individuals' information, limiting the methods of monitoring social networking sites at certain points. It eemphasizs the need to overcome obstacles faced by individuals to ensure that their rights are protected through legal means if they are violated by any party.

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