The article deals with the main principles of protecting digital rights – a new legal category – in the digital environment. In the context of the rapid development of information and communication technologies when cyberspace becomes the platform for interaction between citizens, society, and the state, there is a need to re-evaluate traditional approaches to rights exercised through digital communications on the Internet. The purpose of the study is to examine the legal features and properties of digital rights and identify the principles for protecting digital rights online. The authors employ the general scientific dialectical method as well as the formal legal, systemic structural, and formal logical cognition methods. The synergetic method is used to identify the features and properties of digital rights, this method helps to highlight new rules and new realities in the creative potential of chaos. The authors conclude that the scope of digital legal relations has the characteristics of cross-border and virtuality, thus ensuring the protection of digital rights should be carried out considering the special properties of this environment in which subjects cannot always be identified, and objects are characterized as simulations. Digital rights are obligations and other rights, the content and the exercise of which are determined by their specific features according to the rules and functioning principles of the information and telecommunication system. The holder of a digital right can be a person who can exercise the right. The authors identify the basic principles of protecting digital rights: the digital equality principle; the digital self-determination principle; the anonymous communication principle; the principle of confidentiality of private communications; the principle of privacy in the digital environment; the principle of secrecy of digital identification; the principle of security of data obtained through facial recognition technologies; the principle of erasure of digitalized personal information.
