Omidyar Network believes the ability to formally identify ourselves is a prerequisite for individual empowerment. Digital identity enables people to access financial services and public benefits, such as food, housing, and healthcare. We support experts, organizations, agencies, data, and new technology that builds the knowledge, capacity, and incentives of African governments to develop responsible digital identity programs that respect people’s rights and sustain their basic needs. We also use our voice and partnerships with civil society to hold them accountable to good design and practices that reinforce equity, privacy, inclusion, security, and transparency.

Read our points of view on Good ID here:
All ID Must Be Good ID
Network Unpacks Good ID: An Update to Our Point of View on Digital Identity

Omidyar Network works to create a fair and competitive technology ecosystem. We must rein in big tech’s power that can hurt individual well-being, liberty, and innovation. We support efforts to introduce and enforce checks and balances, contribute new evidence, act as a watchdog, and include historically marginalized voices as we collectively develop policy solutions.

Learn more about our point of view on concentrated power in the tech ecosystem here.

Omidyar Network works to make encrypted messaging platforms safer, healthier, and more trustworthy. To do so, we must stop the viral spread of conspiracy theories, destabilizing hoaxes, fake news, false claims, minority-targeting speech, and organized disinformation campaigns. We educate tech companies and governments on how to preserve privacy protections while making the necessary product and policy changes.

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Every time you explore the internet, you enter into a lopsided bargain: in exchange for access to the digital economy, you surrender your data. Your data is extracted by businesses and governments—to use however they choose. When this assumption goes unchallenged, it perpetuates harmful incentives that fuel extractive business models, exacerbate surveillance risks, and concentrate power and wealth. Today’s mental models preference extractors over users, limit data’s full societal value, and slow innovation. We believe that if upstream assumptions evolve, the rest of the data economy system can operate more equitably. Omidyar Network supports that evolution by surfacing new ideas, creating coalitions to inspire new norms, supporting entrepreneurial experiments, and seeding a new narrative that makes the digital economy equitable for all stakeholders.

The Tech We Want

Omidyar Network is lifting up a new wave of leaders, companies, and technologies in pursuit of a thriving tech system built on inclusivity, mutualism, sustainability, accountability, and responsible innovation. We believe that without the right infrastructure, institutions, “beacon” examples, and a shared narrative, this burgeoning movement will face longer odds to succeed. Our support for healthy alternatives, and the tech leaders who want to build them, will help ensure tech workers, consumers, and investors can all enjoy an equitable technology future.