The digital exception to human rights

There's an unwelcome trend to use transition to digital as an opportunity to cut down on citizens' rights. Sometimes the law explicitly discriminates between online and offline rights. Other times it is done covertly by secret services. Internet monopolies are eager to help when it suits their business interests or when it aligns with views of their owners. Invincible internet mobs and trolls then cover whatever governments and corporations missed.

Here are some examples of the digital exception to human rights:

• Thinking: Thinking is private and inaccessible to the government, but once an AI is involved (say as a brainstorming tool), government will insert itself into the thought process and prohibit certain thoughts.
• Memory and imagination: You can remember or imagine whatever you want, but once you use computer for the same, for example by keeping notes or by using generative AI, your memory and imagination is no longer private. It can be examined, censored, and you can be prosecuted for it.
• Communication: Privacy of correspondence is a human right, but it is implemented only for paper mail. Snowden has shown that governments will read all unencrypted online communication if they can.
• Private space: Since physical distance is irrelevant in the virtual world, boundaries of privacy are defined by encryption instead. Yet governments are pushing for laws that prohibit encryption, leaving no private space in the virtual world.
• Access to information: For certain sensitive queries, search engines will return results for the exact opposite of the query. The information is technically still out there, but it is impossible to find it.
• Voicing opinion: Controversial opinions are removed from search results and from content platforms. This is often accompanied by ban/blocking, which encourages preventive self-censorship.
• Fair use: Copyright law provides a number of fair use exceptions to copyright (backup, resale, quoting, uncreative content). These exceptions are however often disabled by technical means for electronic copies.
• Anonymity: Commercial tracking is less of a problem these days thanks to GDPR. Governments are however still free to track and build detailed personal profiles of absolutely everyone.

As virtual increasingly supplants the physical, the lower standards of citizens' rights in the virtual world are applied increasingly widely while the higher standards from the physical world gradually fade into irrelevance. This way citizens' rights can be curtailed with little resistance.