Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán Attila Kisbenedek/Getty Images Recently, Human Rights Watch released a scathing report detailing the exploitation of personal data by the Hungarian government under Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party. As a Hungarian digital rights researcher, I was not surprised by the findings. But I was pleased to see them finally made public. While the Orbán government’s overreach into the media and judiciary has been well documented, its disregard of privacy rights in pursuit of new voters has been largely overlooked. The report found that the Fidesz party had accessed data collected to administer public services, from COVID vaccines to tax benefits, and used it to generate campaign messages, creating an unequal playing field for the opposition and undermining democracy. This troubling environment for privacy and digital rights in my home country explains why I was so alarmed in August when the U.K.-headquartered telecom company Vodafone announced it had agreed to nonbinding terms for the sale of Vodafone Hungary. The buyer is the Hungarian state, in partnership with a local technology firm called 4iG, which has close ties to Orbán’s party and already holds significant influence over the telecom market. Through my work with Ranking Digital Rights, I’ve seen
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