Privacy, Power, and Protection: Why Weakening Encryption Hurts Women and Gender Minorities

Digital spaces offer both promise and peril for women and gender minorities. They can be empowering, providing access to resources, community, and care at a time when women’s rights and gender equity are being rolled back globally. But these same platforms often magnify and mirror offline violence. And for many, going online means being in an increasingly hostile environment that enables harassment, stalking, and gender-based abuse.

In the face of these dangers, encryption has become one of the most powerful tools available for women and gender minorities to protect themselves in digital spaces. Sometimes referred to as “privacy’s best friend,” encryption is a process that conceals information so that only people with authorization can access it. For survivors of gender-based violence, activists, and anyone who needs some level of privacy online, it offers a crucial layer of safety. And if safety is a right, then encryption is a tool of justice.

Yet, around the world, encryption is under threat. Governments and legislators are attempting to weaken this critical tool under the guise of public safety, often justifying their efforts as protecting women from the misogynistic violence they are experiencing online.

Government concerns about online gendered abuse are valid and urgent, but weakening encryption will not solve them. In fact, doing so risks making women and gender minorities less safe in both digital and physical spaces. As lawmakers grapple with regulating digital spaces in the name of individual and public safety, they must consider the gendered implications of undermining encryption.

Encryption is a vessel for power and agency. When it works, it reassures users that their communication and data is safeguarded—protecting autonomy, dignity, and safety, especially for marginalized communities. For example, in places around the world where LGBTQ people are criminalized or face discrimination, encrypted communication platforms serve as lifelines, shielding users from data breaches and state violence while enabling access to resources and community.

Seen through this lens, encryption is not merely a technology issue—it’s an equity issue, which makes the current threats to encryption particularly troubling. Governments have passed legislation or applied pressure on tech companies that would create “backdoors” or surveillance mechanisms to access encrypted content. The justification is often grounded in public safety concerns, with governments arguing that they must be able to view communications that are protected by end-to-end encryption in the name of national security and to stop criminal activity. With a similar logic, governments advocate for creating backdoors into encrypted content for “good actors,” namely the government and law enforcement seeking to protect women from misogynistic violence online, preventing violent extremism, or stopping the proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The flawed assumption here, however, is that governments are always “good actors” even though marginalized communities disproportionately experience the worst effects of abuse of state power. Differential treatment by law enforcement has long undermined public trust, especially for communities in which law enforcement has not acted in their best interest and deep distrust of these “good actors” has grown.

There are no viable technical solutions that could create gateways for “good actors” but not “bad actors.” Creating backdoors into encrypted content would weaken encryption for everyone, but the risk is especially high for those already subject to historical patterns of state overreach, including people seeking reproductive care.

The potential harms of weakening encryption are not hypothetical: They are real, and they are gendered. The reality that women and gender minorities are facing increased violence and rollbacks on their rights has created an urgency to ensure that every protection, including encryption, is available to them.

Encryption is a critical tool for survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV)—the rates of which have been increasing since 2020. When it comes to privacy, the stakes are extremely high for survivors of IPV, with one in five homicide victims in the United States having been killed by an intimate partner. The Internet Society worked with the National Network to End Domestic Violence to collate examples of how encryption can materially protect survivors of domestic violence, sexual violence, stalking, and trafficking. They demonstrated that survivors of abuse often rely on encrypted messaging to contact support services, coordinate escape plans, or document their experiences to preserve evidence for legal action. Encryption protects survivors' communication and information from unauthorized access, including from their abuser. It also protects the integrity of evidence and empowers survivors to communicate safely and securely when seeking help.

Issues impacting women and gender minorities rarely operate in silos, as demonstrated by a recent study, which found that in states where abortion has been significantly restricted, IPV increased by 7-10 percent. Abortion bans create a “domino effect” of financial and emotional burdens, putting increased strain on pregnant people seeking abortions and their family environment, which increases the risk of IPV.

That’s why encryption is especially necessary in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, with many states across the U.S. now criminalizing abortion access. People seeking reproductive care need encryption to protect information that could implicate them and trust that their healthcare data is securely stored. Law enforcement has already used personal digital data to prosecute people for seeking reproductive care, and this will likely increase if there are backdoors into encryption. In Mississippi, Latice Fisher was charged with second-degree murder after having a stillbirth at home, based in part on her internet search history and phone data showing she had previously conducted online searches on how to buy misoprostol. Data stored in period tracking apps, chats and messages, and GPS can all be used to further criminalize people seeking reproductive healthcare and their healthcare providers.

Lawmakers around the world have been attempting to weaken encryption in the name of public safety. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government issued a technical capability notice to Apple, which would allow UK law enforcement to access users' encrypted cloud servers. Even though, after external pressure, the UK government recently backed down from forcing Apple to to break its end-to-end encryption, it used gendered justifications to weaken encryption, arguing that the anonymity provided by encryption creates a safe haven for misogynistic violence online. But what’s missing from these conversations is a serious engagement with the gendered consequences of weakening encryption.

Gender-responsive policymaking requires governments to start with and center the needs of women and gender minorities. Feminist analysts have long argued that policy and legislation is often blind to its gendered impacts. In response, some countries, such as Canada, require that all federal policy and legislation undergo a gender impact assessment as part of their development.

As governments continue to put forward legislation that targets encryption, it is vital to adopt a framework grounded in the equity and inclusion that a gender impact assessment would bring to light. Below are some key principles to guide a gender-responsive approach to understanding the equity impacts of policy and legislation aimed at weakening encryption.

1. Use Gender-Disaggregated Data: Data is considered gender-disaggregated when it differentiates based on gender identity. Such data helps expose how different populations are affected by digital harms and surveillance because it illustrates the false assumption of "universal" user experience that erases structural inequities.
2. Listen to Impacted Communities: Survivors of gender-based violence, LGBTQ communities, and community-based civil society organizations are on the frontlines of online gendered harms but are frequently excluded from official policymaking and are underrepresented in technology policy. Their insights are critical to finding workable solutions.
3. Address Root Causes of Gendered Harms: Online violence reflects offline inequality. State surveillance and weakening encryption may treat symptoms of real-world harms without addressing its root causes.
4. Analyze Downstream Effects: Bills designed to weaken encryption may be aimed to address critical public safety issues (such as preventing CSAM or violent extremism), but they could have unintended downstream impacts on marginalized communities. Policymakers must consider the short-term and long-term impacts of their policies to fully understand their potential unintended consequences.
5. Respond to Intersectional Differences: Gender does not exist in isolation. Women and gender minorities experience digital harms differently based on intersecting factors, including race, disability, immigration status, and socioeconomic class. Tech policy should be responsive to and address these differences.

Effective policymaking on encryption requires not only a technical understanding of the tool but also a human understanding of whose lives it impacts and how. Pitting privacy against public safety is a false dichotomy, as the two are inseparable—especially for marginalized communities for whom losing privacy often means losing safety. If we care about safety, we can’t afford to undermine the technologies that make it possible.