Digitale Gesellschaft

Digitale Gesellschaft is a Swiss non-profit association, founded in 2011, that defends fundamental and human rights in the digitally networked world. Working at the intersection of civil liberties, technology policy, and legal advocacy, the organisation informs and advises individuals and institutions on digital rights, assesses the fundamental-rights impact of technology, and mounts legal challenges to surveillance laws. In 2024 the organisation counted approximately 1,150 members, 6 employees, and around 120 volunteers, with an annual budget of CHF 563,556. Digitale Gesellschaft is a member of European Digital Rights (EDRi), the pan-European digital rights coalition.

Founding and consolidation

Digitale Gesellschaft was established in early 2011 as a broadly supported membership association for citizen and consumer protection in the digital age. In autumn 2016 the Swiss Privacy Foundation (Datenschutzstiftung Schweiz) merged into the organisation, concentrating Switzerland's principal digital-rights civil-society capacity under one roof. The organisation is co-directed by Erik Schönenberger — a co-founder and IT security specialist who also sits on the Swiss Press Council — and Rahel Estermann, who joined as co-director in September 2025 having previously served as secretary-general of the Green Party Switzerland and as a cantonal councillor in Lucerne. Board President Eliane Antonia Maurer is an information scientist; board members include computer-science professor Marcel Waldvogel and lawyer Viktor Györffy, president of the grundrechte.ch association. Swiss parliamentarians Balthasar Glättli and Gerhard Andrey (both Green Party national councillors) and Jörg Mäder (Green Liberal national councillor) have contributed actively to the organisation's public and political work.

Surveillance law challenges

Digitale Gesellschaft has pursued two landmark legal challenges against Swiss surveillance statutes.

Data retention. In February 2014, the organisation filed a complaint against Switzerland's obligation — under the Federal Act on the Surveillance of Post and Telecommunications (BÜPF) — requiring all internet, telephone, and postal service providers to store customers' communications metadata for six months without suspicion. The Federal Court dismissed the complaint in April 2018, holding that the storage obligation was compatible with fundamental rights. Six members of Digitale Gesellschaft then escalated the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in September 2018. The case, styled Digitale Gesellschaft v. Switzerland, alleges violations of Articles 8 (private life), 10 (expression), 11 (assembly and association), and 13 (effective remedy) of the European Convention on Human Rights. Switzerland submitted its defence in March 2023; the organisation filed a counter-statement in June 2023, arguing that the government cannot meaningfully separate the storage obligation from the subsequent law-enforcement access and that chilling effects on fundamental freedoms are documented harms.

Cable surveillance. In autumn 2017, Digitale Gesellschaft filed a separate complaint against the cable surveillance powers introduced by the Intelligence Service Act (NDG, 2015), under which the Federal Intelligence Service may intercept entire cable network flows. After the Federal Court remanded the case, it has been pending at the Federal Administrative Court. A December 2022 court filing compelled the government to provide further answers after the organisation produced evidence contradicting official claims about the scope of surveillance.

In spring 2015, Digitale Gesellschaft joined Amnesty International and the Foundation for Consumer Protection in an open letter opposing both the BÜPF reform and the nascent NDG, marking an early coordination of civil society opposition to the legislative package.

Net neutrality and digital infrastructure

The organisation successfully advocated for binding net neutrality provisions in the revised Telecommunications Act (FMG) enacted in 2019, securing protections against throttling and blocking in Swiss telecommunications law — a rare statutory codification of net neutrality principles in a non-EU European state. Digitale Gesellschaft operates several Tor exit nodes in Switzerland and provides DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) and DNS-over-TLS (DoT) resolver services, offering privacy-enhancing digital infrastructure as a direct service to users alongside its policy work.

Automated decision-making and AI regulation

Digitale Gesellschaft has built a sustained advocacy position on the governance of automated decision-making systems (ADMS) and artificial intelligence. The organisation has published a multilingual position paper (German, English, French) proposing a risk-tiered regulatory framework under which organisations self-declare ADMS risk levels — low or no risk receive no restrictions; medium and high risk attract transparency and due-diligence requirements; unacceptable risk (including biometric mass surveillance) is prohibited, with penalties for underclassification. In January 2023, Digitale Gesellschaft was designated an official observer on the Council of Europe's Committee on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), the body that drafted the Council of Europe AI Convention. The organisation subsequently criticised the Convention as insufficient on transparency and civil society inclusion. In November 2023, Digitale Gesellschaft co-signed a joint civil society statement with Pour Demain, AlgorithmWatch CH, and other Swiss organisations demanding a national legal framework for AI and ADMS.

Other campaigns and events

Ongoing campaigns have addressed social media age and identity verification (opposed as disproportionate), the POLAP police data-sharing platform, the Eurodac migration data regulation, e-voting security, and the "10-Mio-Schweiz" popular initiative. Digitale Gesellschaft runs digital self-defense workshops and curates an annual multidisciplinary public event, the Winterkongress — a weekend of talks and workshops for hackers, programmers, and activists discussing technology's societal impact, with recent editions covering data protection law, AI ethics, security and privacy tools, and digital civil liberties.

Position in the movement

Digitale Gesellschaft is Switzerland's leading digital-rights civil society organisation and the country's primary voice in pan-European digital rights advocacy through EDRi. Its distinctiveness within the German-speaking European context lies in the combination of strategic litigation — two pending cases (ECHR and Federal Administrative Court) directly challenging state mass surveillance — with public membership infrastructure, direct digital services (Tor, DNS), and multilateral engagement including an observer seat on the Council of Europe's AI committee. Switzerland's non-EU status makes this work structurally significant: Swiss residents lack the protections of the EU AI Act, GDPR, and the NIS2 Directive, so civil-society pressure is a principal lever for rights protection. The organisation's insistence that surveillance, data retention, AI governance, and digital infrastructure are interconnected dimensions of the same fundamental-rights landscape positions it as a model for civil-society organisations operating in non-EU European contexts.