For most of us, a leaked email or a hacked account is a nuisance. For someone living with HIV in a country where their status could get them arrested, disowned, or attacked, the same breach can be a matter of life and death.
That stark reality sits at the heart of a warning from the UN’s HIV/AIDS programme. As health and social services rush online, UNAIDS says protecting people’s privacy — and making sure the digital shift doesn’t deepen existing inequalities — has become an urgent priority. In an interview with UN News, UNAIDS’ Daria Ocheret laid out how the risks have moved from theoretical worry to daily threat, and why the most vulnerable people are the ones most exposed.
The lesson the pandemic taught
The alarm bells first rang loudly during COVID-19.
When lockdowns hit, HIV testing and treatment services moved online almost overnight. That sounds like progress — until you look at who could actually reach them. The pandemic exposed just how unevenly people could access digital services, and the gap was often invisible to the organizations designing them.
Ocheret pointed to a telling example in Zimbabwe. A clinic posted detailed online guidance on how to keep receiving antiretroviral medicines during lockdown. The problem? Many people living with HIV only had mobile data packages that opened social media and messaging apps — not ordinary websites. The information existed, but the people who needed it most simply couldn’t load the page.
“The gap between our assumptions about how digital technologies could improve access to services and what people could actually access was something that really struck me,” Ms. Ocheret told UN News.
In Kazakhstan, the barrier was even more basic. An organization founded by women living with HIV had to help clients obtain the QR codes needed to enter health facilities during the pandemic — some had no phone at all, others simply didn’t know how to use the system.
A divide that runs deeper than borders
One of Ocheret’s sharpest points is that the digital divide isn’t just a rich-country-versus-poor-country problem. It runs within communities.
Among people living with HIV, LGBTQI people, sex workers, and people who use drugs, some are highly connected while others lack devices, reliable internet, or the skills to get online at all. That unevenness means a well-intentioned move to digital services can quietly leave the most marginalized behind.
“How do we make sure that digital inequality does not create even greater barriers to HIV services? That requires systemic solutions,” she said. In other words, patching one clinic’s website isn’t enough — the whole system has to be designed with the least-connected user in mind.
From theoretical risk to real attacks
Back in 2020, UNAIDS helped train women’s organizations in Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine in digital security, including how to use VPNs. At the time, Ocheret said, the threats were still largely theoretical.
That is no longer the case.
A 2025 survey of 21 LGBTI organizations across 17 countries found that most had suffered cyberattacks — often repeatedly — and had significant gaps in their ability to respond. The danger has shifted from a hypothetical on a training slide to a recurring feature of these groups’ daily operations.
And Ocheret is emphatic that online harm cannot be separated from offline violence. The same LGBTI groups being hacked are also seeing their offices and shelters physically attacked. Around 64 countries — roughly a third of the world — still criminalize same-sex relationships, though the Global AIDS Strategy aims to cut that figure to 10 percent, a goal reaffirmed in a political declaration adopted by countries on 22 June.
She is careful not to blame the technology itself. “It would be wrong to say that digital technologies have caused an increase in violence,” she said. “They have simply become another space where harm can be inflicted on key populations and on the organizations that support them.”
When a hack shuts down a lifeline
The gravest risk facing community groups is unauthorized access to client and staff records — especially where same-sex relationships, sex work, or drug use are criminalized. A single leaked list can turn into a weapon.
UNAIDS partners in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have reported a grim catalogue of tactics: fake dating-app profiles used to entrap people, unlawful phone searches, social media surveillance, blackmail, and disinformation campaigns aimed at activists.
The human cost is best captured by one case. A Central Asian organization was hit by a string of hacks and phishing attacks that exposed its office address and lists of activists. That breach triggered blackmail and harassment so severe it forced the group to shut down entirely. Staff eventually restarted the work under a new organization with its own cybersecurity policy — but funding is so tight that it can’t update its defences regularly or issue secure devices.
It’s a sobering illustration of the whole problem: the people doing the most dangerous, essential work often have the fewest resources to protect themselves.
New tools bring new dangers
Even as budgets shrink, chatbots and other digital services are emerging as an appealing, low-cost way to reach people. And sometimes they work remarkably well.
In Brazil, a chatbot built for young transgender people has earned surprising trust — some users share things with it they wouldn’t tell a human social worker. For a population often failed by traditional services, that kind of candour is genuinely valuable.
But that trust hinges entirely on confidentiality, and here the risks get subtle. As Ocheret explained, even the topic of a question can be revealing. If someone asks about the side effects of medicines used for HIV prevention or treatment, that question alone may indirectly signal that the person is living with HIV. In settings marked by stigma and criminalization, that inference can put them in danger.
Shared devices make it worse. Researchers in Kenya found that many people share a single phone with relatives, neighbours, or friends. A stray chatbot notification or a line of browsing history could inadvertently reveal someone’s HIV status or sexual orientation to the very people they most need to keep it from.
Closing the gap without leaving anyone behind
Newer technology is already proving its worth in the HIV response, helping with vaccine research, epidemiological analysis, and health counselling. But Ocheret warned that these advances risk hardening the divide rather than closing it.
Better-funded organizations can afford secure software, dedicated IT staff, and paid tools with stronger protections. Smaller, grassroots groups — often the ones closest to the most at-risk communities — frequently cannot. Left unchecked, that imbalance means the best privacy protections flow to those who already have the most, while the most exposed groups make do with whatever they can scrape together.
UNAIDS’ response is deliberately bottom-up. Rather than trying to build one universal fix, it is backing tools developed by communities themselves and helping to scale up what already works on the ground.
Ocheret’s practical advice for organizations is refreshingly concrete: regularly review both digital and physical security risks, keep protocols updated, secure reliable access to legal counsel, and — crucially — set aside a dedicated budget for security rather than treating it as an afterthought.
The bigger picture
The move to online health services was supposed to make care more accessible. For many, it has. But this warning is a reminder that “accessible” and “safe” are not the same thing — and that for the world’s most criminalized and stigmatized communities, the two can pull in opposite directions.
The challenge UNAIDS lays out is not to retreat from technology, but to build it with the reality of its users in mind: the person on a data-only phone plan, the activist whose contact list is a target, the teenager sharing one device with an entire household. Get that right, and digital tools can extend a lifeline. Get it wrong, and the same tools can expose the very people they were meant to protect.