Overwatch Report Campaign

Privacy Rights Registry

Right now, if someone publishes your home address online to enable harassment, there is no specific law in Ireland that makes it a crime. There is no system to declare your privacy rights in advance. No way for companies to check before they process your data. No audit trail when they don't bother.

This registry is a working prototype of what government-backed privacy infrastructure could look like. Register your rights, verify your email, and become a confirmed signatory. The more people who sign, the harder it is for government to ignore.

Legal notice: This is an educational civic prototype. Rights declared here are not legally binding on any organisation. Your existing GDPR rights (access, erasure, objection) apply independently of this registry. Your email is used for verification only and is never displayed publicly. Read the full article →

Live data

0 Confirmed Signatories

2 Total Registrations

0 Lookups Performed

0% Lookups Blocked

Rights Declared by Confirmed Signatories

Anti-Doxxing

No AI Training

No Deepfakes

No Facial Recognition

No Profiling

No Data Sale

No Marketing

Data Portability

Register Your Rights

Choose a display name, enter your email for verification, and select the rights you want to declare.

Display Name *

Shown publicly in the registry count. Use any name you're comfortable with.

Email Address *

For verification only. Never displayed, never shared. One registration per email.

Privacy Rights

Select the rights you want to declare. In a government-backed system, each would create a binding, enforceable instruction.

Anti-Doxxing Protection No one may publish your personal information without consent. No AI Training Your data may not be used to train AI models. No AI Manipulation / Deepfakes Your likeness may not be used to generate or alter images or video. No Facial Recognition Your biometric data may not be processed for identification. No Automated Profiling No decisions based solely on automated processing. No Data Sale Your data may not be sold or shared commercially. No Direct Marketing No marketing contact without explicit consent. Data Portability Your data must be provided in machine-readable format on request.

How It Works

Register your display name, email, and choose which rights to declare.
You receive a verification email. Click the link to confirm.
You become a confirmed signatory with a unique registration number.
When a company attempts a lookup against your number, the system checks your declared rights.
If your rights block the request, access is denied and the attempt is logged.
The audit trail creates automatic evidence for DPC complaints or legal proceedings.

What This Proves

The technology for proactive privacy enforcement already works. Ireland built the Lobbying Register on this exact model. Apple's App Tracking Transparency proves app-store enforcement works.

A single bill, modelled on the Lobbying Act, would make this system mandatory for data processors operating in Ireland. The technology is ready. The question is political will.

See the Enforcement

Pretend you're a company. Enter a registration number and try to access someone's data. Watch the system block the request, log the attempt, and create an evidence trail.

What's Missing — Honestly

This demonstrator proves the technology works. Here's what it can't do alone:

Legislation. Without a legal mandate, compliance is voluntary. The system needs a statutory basis — like the Lobbying Act gave the lobbying register.
App store enforcement. Apple and Google would need to require apps to check the registry. Apple has done this before with App Tracking Transparency.
Metadata preservation. Social media platforms strip image metadata on upload. AI rights declarations embedded in images only work until platforms strip them.
Determined adversaries. A motivated attacker can bypass any system. But most harm is casual, opportunistic, and commercial — and those actors comply when consequences exist.

Estimated effectiveness: 50–70% with enforcement, 20–30% voluntary. Currently, the protection rate is 0%. Any improvement on zero is worth building.

The Deeper Problem: You Are the Product

This registry exists because of a broken bargain. Every "free" platform you use — every social media account, every search engine, every messaging app — is funded by harvesting your attention, your behaviour, your relationships, and your data. You're not the customer. You're the inventory.

But the damage goes deeper than data. Social media is architecturally anti-social. The platforms are designed to maximise time-on-screen, not connection. Engagement algorithms promote outrage over joy because anger keeps you scrolling. The "like" button — designed by a Facebook engineer who later called it "bright dings of pseudo-pleasure" — triggers the same dopamine pathways as a slot machine.

The result: a generation that has more "friends" than any generation in history and is simultaneously the loneliest. Ireland has no legislation addressing algorithmic manipulation or addictive design. The EU's Digital Services Act requires some transparency but does not ban the dark patterns that make platforms addictive.

Para-social relationships — one-sided emotional investments in people who don't know you exist — are now the dominant form of social engagement for millions. You feel you "know" someone you follow. They couldn't pick you out of a crowd. That's not community. That's content consumption dressed up as connection. Robin Dunbar's research confirms what most people intuitively know: online interactions do not maintain relationship quality the way face-to-face interactions do. Yet the average person now spends 2.5 hours daily on social media while in-person socialising has declined by 30% since 2003.

The privacy registry protects your data. But the larger fight is for your attention, your relationships, and your right to a digital environment that isn't designed to exploit you.

Take The Social Contract →

Make Them Build It

Every confirmed registration is a verified person saying: “I want these rights, and I want the state to enforce them.”

0 confirmed signatories so far. When this number is large enough, it stops being a prototype and starts being a mandate.