The terms cybersecurity and digital security have become commonplace in public, political, and technological debates. However, far from being neutral or merely technical concepts, they refer to human practices that directly impact the exercise of fundamental rights. For human rights defenders, especially in Latin America, these notions acquire particular relevance in contexts marked by violence, structural inequality, and unequal access to digital technologies, which impose specific challenges to the defense of rights.
From a traditional perspective, cybersecurity is usually defined as the set of policies, measures, and practices aimed at preventing, detecting, and responding to threats in digital environments. This approach, historically linked to the protection of critical infrastructures, computer systems, and strategic assets, tends to prioritize a risk management logic focused on stability, technical resilience, and the protection of economic or state interests. However, more advanced contemporary approaches recognize that cybersecurity cannot be limited to the technical sphere, and must explicitly incorporate the protection of human rights, acting not only as a defensive mechanism but also as a facilitator of rights such as privacy, intimacy, and freedom of expression. In this sense, cybersecurity is also understood as a social and economic challenge, closely linked to development and democratic values.
For its part, digital security proposes a significant conceptual shift: instead of focusing on systems, it places the focus on people, especially those who are in situations of greater exposure or vulnerability. From this perspective, digital security is defined as the set of risks, incidents, and vulnerabilities that affect people in their use and appropriation of digital tools. Here, vulnerability is not understood as an individual flaw, but as a structural weakness in information protection systems, devices, and digital environments in which these people operate.
Within this framework, risk is conceived as the possibility that a vulnerability may be exploited, considering both the probability of the event and the magnitude of its consequences; while an incident represents the concrete materialization of that risk. This approach allows us to understand that digital insecurity is not an isolated fact, but the result of complex interactions between technology, social context, powerful actors, and pre-existing inequalities.
This is the approach adopted by TEDIC, understanding digital security as a key tool for the comprehensive protection of people, and not only as a strategy for protecting technological assets. TEDIC’s perspective recognizes that strengthening digital security involves reducing structural vulnerabilities and empowering users so that they can exercise their rights in digital environments safely and autonomously.
Closely related to this perspective is digital appropriation, conceived as a social, intentional, and collective process in which different actors exchange, adapt, and transform technological knowledge. Unlike the simple adoption or popularization of tools, often driven by states, markets, or algorithms, digital appropriation places users as active protagonists, capable of contextualizing technologies to their own realities, needs, and struggles.
In this sense, Internet access cannot be reduced to mere technical connectivity. Meaningful access implies the ability to understand how technologies work, modify them, produce relevant content, and overcome the so-called “usage barrier,” that is, the real capacity to take advantage of ICTs to fully participate in the information society. The notion of meaningful connectivity reinforces this idea, emphasizing that without appropriation, literacy, and adequate material conditions, the promise of digital inclusion remains incomplete.
Although the global trend is to use the definition of Cybersecurity, at TEDIC we work on advocacy from the perspective of digital security.
