A/HRC/35/28 and its ability to foster constituencies of people with shared interests — make it well suited to generate innovative solutions to problems. These characteristics also mean that civil society has great potential as a “third engine” of innovation, which is driven neither by profit (unlike business-led innovation) nor State interest (unlike government-led innovation). 57. One example of this is refrigeration technology known as Greenfreeze, which the NGO Greenpeace helped to develop in the 1990s.45 Greenfreeze improved upon existing refrigeration technology by eliminating the need for gases that contributed to ozone depletion and global warming. Today, there are over 850 million Greenfreeze units in use globally. 58. The enthusiasm with which civil society has leveraged digital technology to organize, deliberate and innovate has been remarkable. While the role of social media in mobilizing people during the Arab Awakening is well known, it has proved just as useful in other contexts. In Saudi Arabia, women who are unable to freely operate in public due to severe societal restrictions, including a ban on women driving, use online spaces to participate in a virtually connected civil society. This is a perfect example of why the Special Rapporteur, the Human Rights Council and others have repeatedly underscored that the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association apply online as well as offline (see A/HRC/26/29, para. 22 and A/HRC/RES/21/16). 59. Many civil society groups have developed applications that take advantage of technology to perform helpful functions, such as transferring money and arranging credit, tracking weather and rainfall patterns for agriculture and performing health- and educationrelated tasks. More broadly, the development of open source software, namely computer software that can be studied, changed and distributed to anyone and for any purpose, has been largely driven by civil society organizations such as the Mozilla Foundation, 46 the Open Source Initiative47 and the Free Software Foundation. 48 60. However, technology is a double-edged sword. Technological advancements can be used for both good and ill. Civil society groups operating in this field have remained at the forefront of the rapidly changing technological landscape, particularly as it affects privacy concerns. Civil society is involved in numerous efforts to protect people against censorship, surveillance and attacks on their persons or data perpetrated by States and other entities. For example, the Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports advocates against the export of digital surveillance technologies used to commit human rights violations and the Tactical Technology Collective helps human rights advocates, activists and journalists enhance their digital security skills. 49 Civil society also recognizes the unbalanced power relationships that underlie ownership and control of digital technologies, dominated largely by corporations, and is increasingly advocating for, and participating in, democratic forms of Internet governance and control.50 61. Civil society uses ubiquitous crowdsourcing platforms to expand the reach of its work, attracting broader audiences than was previously possible, in order to find solutions to problems. For example, the Ushahidi platform was developed to map and respond to electoral violence during the 2008 elections in Kenya, but has since been deployed for other crowdsourced information needs around the world. 51 Crowdfunding, which is also facilitated by digital technology, provides fundraisers with access to a diverse audience that they may not typically interact with and may help them to attract donors who might not ordinarily contribute to their cause. 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 14 See www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/happy-birthdaygreenfreeze/blog/44473/. See www.mozilla.org/en-US/. See https://opensource.org/. See www.fsf.org/. See www.privacyinternational.org/node/602 and https://tacticaltech.org/projects/28. See https://community.icann.org/display/gnsononcomstake/About+Us. See www.ushahidi.com/case-studies/uchaguzi.