In 2007, a group of Argentine lawyers went to court to prove that economic data transparency is a prerequisite for civil and political participation. The state had begun obscuring how it measured inflation—numbers dictating the price of food, the value of wages, and the cost of living. The lawyers successfully argued that when economic data is hidden, citizens are stripped of their democratic agency; it’s impossible to hold power to account when blindfolded to the metrics organizing daily survival. The ruling launched a landmark campaign by the Argentine Association for Civil Rights (ADC) that ultimately established the constitutional right to public information not as an abstract legal concept, but as a vital tool for civic participation.
Founded in 1995, ADC spent decades expanding fundamental rights through public-interest strategic litigation. Its landmark cases on congressional transparency, disability rights, and equal marriage have strengthened democracy and protected vulnerable communities across Latin America.
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By the early 2010s, ADC turned its focus to the digital landscape. The internet had become “the merchant of reality,” according to ADC executive director Valeria Milanes and co-director Alejandro Segarra. The same rights ADC long defended in courtrooms were now being undermined by algorithms and global platforms. The organization recognized that the exercise of rights could no longer be won or lost only in national courts. Decisions were increasingly being made elsewhere, in global centers of tech production and economic power, through the design of digital systems and in the agreements that governed them.
This asymmetry is most visible in countries like Argentina. As a leading global producer of soy, corn, beef, and honey, Argentina feeds much of the world. Yet as global AgTech platforms embed themselves into its farms, they collect vast amounts of agricultural data, channeling the financial value upward, marginalizing local producers from these economic gains.
But the stakes extend far beyond uncompensated collection of data. This digital enclosure creates profound systemic harm. First, it leads producers into a cycle of technological dependency and vendor lock-in. Mirroring global challenges like the “right to repair,” Argentinian producers find their autonomy limited, unable to fix proprietary software when it fails or refuses to deliver. Second, this extraction fuels an ecosystem of corporate data monetization. By hoarding hyper-local data on crop yields and soil health, global platforms gain an unprecedented informational advantage, using it to influence market behaviors and distort pricing in ways that are deeply unfair, inequitable, and opaque.
“You cannot treat this as only a technical or regulatory discussion,” says Segarra. “It has to do with governance.” For ADC, economic governance in the digital age is deeply connected to civil rights.
The challenge is systemic. Big Tech’s extension into agriculture proves that platforms are no longer just hosting public squares, but actively organizing economic life through data exploitation that impacts producers and consumers alike. To confront this, ADC realized it could no longer treat digital rights as isolated issues. “We started to think as an ecosystem,” says Milanes.
Instead of fighting standard, reactive tech policy battles, the organization pivoted. By aligning with the agricultural sector—one of Argentina’s most politically and economically vital constituencies—ADC gained leverage to bring core civil rights like privacy directly into regional and global economic governance forums. Rather than lobbying tech platforms after the fact, they act as knowledge managers and community builders, driving systemic change from inside the trade and development processes where rules are written.
This approach has allowed ADC to anchor Global South civil society in influential spaces like the Ibero-American Data Protection Network, ensuring regional realities shape international standards. By carrying a regional perspective into the OECD, G20, and Mercosur negotiations, ADC fundamentally challenges the assumption that uniform standards designed elsewhere will fit local realities. Ultimately, their model demonstrates that the front line of technology justice is no longer just tech policy; it is economic governance.
In the rapid push for digital integration, Latin American countries often adopt platforms designed in North America while trying to import regulatory frameworks from Europe; this decoupling of mismatched systems creates a persistent friction across the entire regional digital landscape.
To break this cycle of regulatory dependence, ADC translates global standards into regional legal realities. The organization champions three core principles to shape how these technologies are governed: transparency, to make complex systems intelligible to those they affect; accountability, to safeguard fundamental civil rights; and policy interoperability, to ensure fragmented rules do not undermine legal protections across borders.
By drawing on a shared legal culture to bridge the gap between local realities and international decision-makers, ADC insists that in a highly digitized world, economic governance and civil rights are inseparable.
