Technology & Human Rights Fellow (2026-27)
Ragheb Ghandour is a technologist whose career has centered on digital rights and surveillance technology, with a particular focus on the Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) region.
His background is in computer science and digital security, and his work proceeds from a consistent operating premise: understanding what software, infrastructure, and data pipelines actually do, rather than what they claim to do.
Over the course of that career, Ghandour has worked at the technical core of digital rights research, conducting infrastructure audits, tracing surveillance supply chains, and analyzing the adtech and SDK ecosystems that connect ordinary devices to commercial and state data markets. His work has involved collaboration with organizations including SMEX and the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, among others, reflecting a sustained engagement with the civil society and human rights communities most directly affected by surveillance infrastructure in the region. A throughline across this body of work is the translation of complex technical findings into resources, audits, and guidance that journalists, lawyers, and rights defenders operating under real resource constraints can put to immediate use.
His current research develops a technically grounded evaluation methodology for assessing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) under adversarial, low-legal-protection conditions, with SWANA populations as the primary case. The work engages with the epistemic rights frameworks developed by Mathias Risse and Lani Watson, applying them to infrastructure and technical practice rather than extending their underlying theory, in a regulatory landscape where instruments like the GDPR do not reach and courts are frequently captured or unavailable as a recourse. The resulting methodology is built from infrastructure audits, SDK and adtech analysis, and PETs adequacy assessment rather than from sociological theory-building, a deliberate choice consistent with where his expertise and credibility, built over years of hands-on technical work, genuinely lie.
Fellowship Project: Advertisement intelligence, the infrastructure converting human behavior into tradable data, expands across Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) largely outside the oversight found in Europe or the US. This project develops a technical evaluation methodology for epistemic rights enforcement in that environment, assessing how advertising and tracking infrastructure operating in the region collects, moves, and exposes personal data, and which privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) offer meaningful protection under adversarial, low-legal-protection conditions.
Applying Risse's and Watson's epistemic rights frameworks to infrastructure rather than theory, the project asks what populations in SWANA can know about how they are surveilled, and what tools exist to close that gap.
Outputs include a comparative analysis of advertising and surveillance infrastructure across SWANA states, an adversarial PETs adequacy framework, and a toolkit for journalists, lawyers, and rights defenders.