Homo Digitalis

Homo Digitalis is Greece's first digital rights civil-society organisation, founded in March 2018 in Athens and the only Greek member of the European Digital Rights (EDRi) network. Its stated mission is to promote and defend human rights in the modern digital era — with a focus on the moment when new technologies and artificial intelligence are deployed by private or public entities — through three pillars of action: raising public awareness, shaping policy decisions, and strategic legal interventions. Starting as an all-volunteer organisation with no predecessor in the Greek digital-rights field, Homo Digitalis has grown over seven years into a recognised watchdog with over 100 members drawn from law, computer science, humanities, and social sciences, a paid professional staff, and a position as one of the clearer examples in Southern Europe of a domestic digital-rights organisation that built itself from scratch against the backdrop of an EU regulatory cycle it helped shape.

Founding and structure

Homo Digitalis was founded in March 2018 by five co-founders — Elpida Vamvaka, Stefanos Vitoratos, Konstantinos Kakavoulis, Manos Papadakis, and Eleftherios Chelioudakis — all lawyers, in a deliberate response to the absence of any domestic civil-society voice on digital rights in Greece. The EDRi member spotlight notes the founders' observation that no digital rights organisations existed in Greece at the time, framing the founding as gap-filling rather than movement-extending. Chelioudakis serves as Executive Director. The organisation is registered as a Civil Non-Profit Company based in Athens and has grown from its volunteer origins into a funded organisation supported primarily by European foundations, the European Commission, and international digital-rights grant programmes — a trajectory the European AI & Society Fund has described as building "from a volunteer-run collective to a digital rights watchdog." The organisation's membership base of 100+ is deliberately multi-disciplinary, spanning lawyers, technologists, humanists, and social scientists.

EDRi membership

Homo Digitalis joined EDRi as an observer member in November 2018 — within months of its founding — and became a full EDRi member in 2020, a transition the organisation describes as among its most significant milestones. Its full membership makes it the only Greek organisation in the European digital-rights network and places it inside the EDRi table at which European national digital-rights organisations agree common positions on AI, biometric surveillance, and platform regulation for the EU institutions. The co-drafting role on the July 2023 AI Act trilogue civil-society statement — which lists Homo Digitalis alongside EDRi, AlgorithmWatch, Access Now, Amnesty International, Bits of Freedom, and others as named co-drafters — is its most prominent act of European-level coalition work.

Strategic litigation — Clearview AI

The most internationally prominent of Homo Digitalis's legal actions is its complaint against Clearview AI, filed in May 2021 in concert with Privacy International, the Hermes Center, and Austrian advocacy group noyb. Clearview AI operates a facial recognition database of more than three billion facial images scraped from social media and public websites, which it sells to private companies and law-enforcement agencies globally. The Hellenic Data Protection Authority's Decision 35/2022 of 13 July 2022 found Clearview AI in violation of GDPR, imposed a €20 million fine — the highest the Hellenic DPA had imposed on a private entity at the time — prohibited the company from collecting and processing the personal data of data subjects located in Greece using facial recognition methods, and ordered immediate deletion of all previously collected Greek-resident data. The parallel enforcement actions in Italy (€20 million fine) and the UK (£7.5 million fine) during the same period made the coordinated multi-country complaint strategy — in which Homo Digitalis served as the Greek filing point — one of the more legible instances of pan-European civil-society litigation coordination producing co-temporal national DPA action against the same actor.

Strategic litigation — KENTAUROS and HYPERION

Homo Digitalis's second major litigation track concerns the Greek state's use of surveillance and biometric systems in its asylum reception and accommodation facilities. In early February 2022 a coalition including Homo Digitalis, the Hellenic League for Human Rights, HIAS Greece, academic Niovi Vavoula, and — separately — the UNHCR Delegation in Greece filed complaints with the Hellenic DPA against the Ministry of Asylum and Migration over two systems: KENTAUROS, a surveillance deployment in reception facilities using CCTV cameras, drones, and AI behavioural analytics algorithms; and HYPERION, a biometric access-control system processing asylum seekers' fingerprints for facility entry and exit. The Hellenic DPA's Decision 13/2024 of 3 April 2024 found violations of GDPR Articles 25 and 35 (failure to conduct a proper Data Protection Impact Assessment, €100,000) and Article 31 (failure to cooperate with the DPA and to clarify processing activities, €75,000), imposing a total €175,000 fine — the record for any Greek public authority at the time of the decision. The case sits at the intersection of Homo Digitalis's AI-governance work and the broader coalition focus on technology misuse against migrants and asylum seekers at Europe's borders.

Greek Artificial Intelligence Network (GAIN)

In 2024 Homo Digitalis launched the Greek Artificial Intelligence Network (GAIN), a coalition of civil-society organisations, academics, and investigative journalists focused on enforcing the EU AI Act in Greece and monitoring AI deployment across sectors including education, culture, policing, and migration management. The network's founding conference took place on 7 October 2025 at the Greek Forum of Migrants offices in Athens and drew over 40 member organisations including the Hellenic League for Human Rights, the Greek Council for Refugees, the Open Technologies Alliance, the Union of Informatics Professionals, the Consumers' Association, and the Network for Children's Rights. GAIN is coordinated by the Homo Digitalis team with support from the European AI & Society Fund and is described by the Fund as the vehicle for mobilising tech and social justice groups across Greece around the AI Act implementation cycle.

Funding

Homo Digitalis's disclosed funders include the European AI & Society Fund (€108,000 in 2022 for capacity-building; €72,000 for 2024–2026; €48,000 for the GAIN project 2025–2026), the Digital Freedom Fund (€17,000 in 2023 for metadata retention research and legal interventions), the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Public Voice Fund (€4,300 in February 2019, €4,500 in December 2020), the Active Citizens Fund via EEA Grants (€4,500 in 2020 for the Digital RiSe project), EDRi (over €35,000 since 2020 for joint research and actions), the European Commission (€230,000 for 2023–2026 as work-package leader for the NGI TALER electronic payment pilot), and Wikimedia Deutschland (€10,000 in 2020–2021 for EU Copyright Directive advocacy). The organisation also benefits from in-kind domain and hosting support and individual donations. The pattern — predominantly European foundation and institutional money with a significant Commission grant — reflects the maturation of a volunteer-run advocacy group into a professional organisation.