Exploring the Nexus between Technologies and Human Rights 16 mobile, and telecommunications companies on their policies and practices that affect their users’ freedom of expression and privacy.5 The Freedom on the Net report, produced by Freedom House, is also an annual report which produces country reports and ratings on Internet and digital media freedom based on three categories: 1) obstacles to access, 2) limits on content, and 3) violations on user rights6. These reports provide a useful, up to date, and comparative understanding of the global digital rights situation. While the operationalisation of the concepts in these reports does help in concretising the concepts, they focus on the measurement of a list of indicators and do not dive deep into the conceptualisation beyond what is needed for practical application. At the time of writing, Ranking Digital Rights is refining its methodology to include human rights harm in targeted advertising and artificial intelligence, which provides an indication of where digital rights violations are heading towards, but does not situate them within a systemic, big picture framework of digital rights. From the literature review, it is clear that there is much interest in the field of digital rights, however, its development is hindered by the lack of a strong theoretical framework. The next two sections attempt to address this gap. Building a Conceptual Framework During the FGDs, digital rights activists and advocates were asked what “digital rights” meant to them and what would be important to include in a definition of digital rights. They were instructed to write down their thoughts on pieces of paper, and then to stick the notes onto the wall. A discussion was facilitated with the group based on the notes posted. In all focus groups, the notes exhibited a similar pattern of two types of notes: overarching statements and specific rights and issues that the participants thought should be included as part of digital rights. Table 2 provides a representative sample of these notes7 from all the focus groups. 5 6 7 More information can be found here: https://rankingdigitalrights.org/index2019/report/indexmethodology/ The report can be found at https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net-methodology Notes with the same meaning have been omitted.