What's the Deal With Human Rights and Technical Standards?

### Overview Dan Applequist, an open-source strategist at Samsung and co-chair of the W3C Advisory Board, examines the critical intersection between technical standards, human rights, and social responsibility. He argues that technical standards define what computer systems can and cannot do, which directly dictates what can be done to human beings. Rather than treating technology as neutral, standards bodies and engineers must actively incorporate ethics, societal impact, and human rights considerations early in the design cycle—effectively "shifting left" on human rights.

### Key Topics - **Architecture and Standards as Value Systems:** Standards act as architectural interfaces that build the future. Without explicit ethical considerations, technical advancements risk exacerbating social inequalities and enabling digital surveillance. - **Wide and Horizontal Review:** How open standards processes like the W3C's horizontal review systematically evaluate emerging specifications against accessibility, internationalization, privacy, security, architecture, and sustainability. - **Priority of Constituencies:** A core W3C principle asserting that end-user needs take primacy over web page authors, implementers, specification writers, and theoretical purity. - **Multi-Stakeholder Participation and Preventing Capture:** Ensuring civil society organizations, NGOs (such as the Center for Democracy and Technology and Witness), and underrepresented groups participate in standards creation to avoid corporate or governmental capture.

### Technical Details & Case Studies - **Pervasive Monitoring as an Attack:** Following the 2014 Edward Snowden revelations, technical bodies acknowledged pervasive monitoring as a protocol-level attack, producing IETF RFC 7258 and driving the W3C "securing the web" initiative, the STRINT workshop, and the shift from 30–40% unencrypted web traffic to over 90% HTTPS adoption. - **C2PA Threats and Harms Task Force:** The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) established a task force working with Witness to model abuse scenarios, such as the danger of certificate authority capture allowing governments to control verifiable truth. - **Digital Credentials Abuse:** Based on a document co-authored with Martin Thompson, Applequist warns against "papers, please" models for government-supplied digital IDs on mobile phones. Standards must protect against unwarranted disclosure (e.g., dual-national passport querying at borders or forced identification for trivial web interactions). - **Age Verification and Content Restriction:** A joint W3C/IAB/IETF workshop examined age-gating mechanisms. Even with privacy-preserving zero-knowledge proofs, mandatory digital credential schemes can exclude marginalized, undocumented, or device-lacking populations.

### Takeaways Standards bodies must move beyond technical feasibility to evaluate who benefits, who is excluded, and what power imbalances are reinforced. Mitigating societal threats requires actionable procedures: formal human rights due diligence, threat modeling against abuse cases, funding civil society engagement, and enforcing codes of conduct to maintain inclusive working environments.