Exploring the Nexus between Technologies and Human Rights 24 corporations. In almost all focus groups the threat of China was mentioned, not only in light of Chinese surveillance technologies and ideologies that are being pushed to authoritarian governments within the region, but also scepticism that Southeast Asian governments would have the abilities to protect their citizens’ data against external surveillance by China. At the national level, respondents offered insights of increased collection of citizen data by the state, through “objectifying the individual with numbers, whereby sometimes the numbers are more important than the individual”, as put by a respondent. In the Philippines, the law to put in mandate the universal adoption of a national identification system is highly debated. On one hand, it provides the convenience of administering state services, but on the other hand a log is kept of where the ID holder has used the card, thus collecting and anchoring one’s digital trail to one ID number. Advocates voiced their scepticism of the ability of the government to prevent data breaches. In the Thai focus group, a respondent opined that much of the state procurement of systems and technologies for mass collection of citizen data is vendor-driven, which is to say that the data is collected without any immediate goal and is not done in a critical manner. In Malaysia, concern was expressed on the imminent inclusion of one’s mobile phone number into the information of one’s national ID, which links different datasets by default, making it even easier to form a digital profile of the individual. Access to the Digital About 60% of Southeast Asia’s population is connected to the Internet, with uneven access across the region, as shown in Table 6. The top four countries of Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia have more than 80% of their populations online, while the bottom three of Laos, Myanmar, and Timor Leste have only a third of their populations online. These figures have to be considered against the population size, as Indonesia with its vast population has more than 300 times the number of Internet users in Brunei, even if its Internet penetration is only 53.2%. Respondents pointed out that access is not only about basic infrastructural access but also about quality of service and affordability, as well as literacy in how to maximise the access to connectivity.