SHARE Foundation

SHARE Foundation is Serbia's principal digital rights organization — a Belgrade-based non-profit established in 2012 by the organizers of the SHARE Conferences on internet culture and activism, which drew over a thousand participants to Belgrade and Beirut in 2011 and 2012. Operating on a mandate to advance human rights and freedoms online and promote an open, decentralised internet, the Foundation works across four areas: freedom of expression online, data privacy, digital security, and open access to knowledge. Its multidisciplinary team of lawyers, IT specialists, journalists, and artists has made it the primary counterpart in Serbian civil society for internet-governance, surveillance, and data-protection advocacy — and, through the SEE Digital Rights Network it co-founded, the institutional anchor for digital rights across Southeast Europe.

Founding and structure

The SHARE Foundation grew directly out of the organizers of the SHARE Conferences, which formed a community committed to sustained research and advocacy for human rights in the digital environment. It was formally established as a non-profit in 2012. Vladan Joler, who co-founded the Foundation and led it as director until 2017, went on to found SHARE Lab and continues as professor at the New Media department of the University of Novi Sad. Danilo Krivokapić, a lawyer specializing in personal data protection and information security, serves as the Foundation's current director. Ana Martinović, a human rights litigation lawyer with experience at the European Court of Human Rights, leads strategic litigation and advocacy on biometric surveillance. SHARE Foundation joined European Digital Rights (EDRi) as a member in March 2017. In April 2017, the Foundation registered Serbia's first specialized civil-society Computer Emergency Response Team — SHARE CERT — which provides pro bono legal and technical assistance to online media, civil society organizations, and human rights defenders; the team is accredited by Trusted Introducer and is a member of CiviCERT.

SHARE Lab and data investigations

SHARE Lab — a research and data investigation arm founded by Vladan Joler — conducts investigations into algorithmic transparency, surveillance architecture, and invisible digital infrastructures. Its studies have examined the data-harvesting practices of Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and it produced an influential investigation into Serbia's telecommunications metadata retention regime, using more than two thousand pages of documents gathered through freedom of information requests to demonstrate how Serbia's four largest telecoms allow state bodies systematic access to user metadata. Joler was named by the Mozilla Foundation among 50 people who made the internet a better place in 2016 in recognition of SHARE Lab's impact in rendering digital infrastructure legible to civil society and public audiences.

Advocacy campaigns

Several of SHARE Foundation's campaigns in its first years produced direct policy wins. In 2014, the Foundation authored the legal and technical analysis opposing Gambling Law amendments that would have mandated ISP-level blocking of unlicensed gambling websites — in practice introducing national internet filtering in Serbia; the government withdrew the proposal. That same year, SHARE Foundation discovered and publicly reported a data breach affecting over five million Serbian citizens on the Privatization Agency website, notifying authorities and informing the public to limit misuse. The organization also successfully advocated that blogs and social platforms not be classified as media unless voluntarily registered, influencing Serbia's 2014 Law on Public Information and Media. Between 2015 and 2017, working alongside Serbia's Information Commissioner and other civil society partners, SHARE Foundation pressed for the withdrawal of a data protection draft law that lacked GDPR-compatible safeguards; the original draft was dropped and a GDPR-based replacement was published in 2017. In 2016, the Foundation mobilized civil society, IT sector organizations, and cultural institutions to oppose a Draft Strategy on Intellectual Property 2016-2020 that proposed domain seizure and website removal without content-level distinction; the proposal was rejected.

Thousands of Cameras and facial recognition

In 2019, the Serbian government announced a mass surveillance rollout with Huawei — installing smart cameras with facial recognition and AI analytics capabilities across Belgrade under the "Safe City" project. SHARE Foundation joined and led the citizen initiative #hiljadekamera (Thousands of Cameras), which built a crowdsourced map of surveillance camera locations at hiljade.kamera.rs and submitted freedom of information requests to the Ministry of Interior; the Ministry refused disclosure, claiming procurement documents were confidential. The campaign surfaced the absence of required data protection impact assessments and turned Belgrade's expanding biometric surveillance infrastructure into a sustained public issue. Ana Martinović, who led the advocacy over the following five years, advanced the argument that mass biometric surveillance is incompatible with human rights standards, submitted comments twice on draft legislation, and engaged the EU AI Act process as a European regulatory lever. The Foundation co-produced a documentary, #hiljadekamera, on biometric mass surveillance in Belgrade and has hosted AI governance summer schools for European activists on these questions.

State surveillance documentation

SHARE Foundation has played a central role in documenting Serbian state authorities' use of commercial surveillance tools against civil society. In November 2023, the Foundation joined Amnesty International, Access Now, and Citizen Lab in a collaborative investigation documenting zero-click spyware attacks against Serbian civil society members by Serbian police (MUP) and the Security Intelligence Agency (BIA). Amnesty International's December 2024 report further documented widespread misuse of the Cellebrite digital forensics tool to unlawfully access activists' and journalists' phones; SHARE Foundation demanded independent investigations and safeguards. On February 25, 2025, Cellebrite announced it was halting use of its forensic tool in Serbia — a direct outcome of the documented abuse. SHARE Foundation subsequently published a technical analysis of NoviSpy, a custom-built Android spyware whose command-and-control infrastructure was confirmed as Serbia-based, characterizing the pattern of state digital repression as systematic rather than sporadic.

Place in the movement

SHARE Foundation is the corpus entry representing the Serbian and Southeast European node of the digital rights field. Where organizations like Access Now and EDRi operate globally and pan-European respectively, SHARE Foundation's primary focus is the Serbian institutional landscape and its regional extension through the SEE Digital Rights Network — co-founded with BIRN in August 2020 and now comprising 39 organizations across nine countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia). The combination of grassroots civic campaigns (#hiljadekamera), technical data investigation (SHARE Lab, NoviSpy), emergency response infrastructure (SHARE CERT), and sustained legislative advocacy places SHARE Foundation across the full stack of digital rights work. Its membership in EDRi provides leverage on EU-level regulatory processes — notably the AI Act and the Digital Services Act — as a channel back into regional advocacy, and the SEE Digital Rights Network functions as an amplifier for its documentation and litigation work across a region with few comparable institutions.