For a world where technology will empower and enable us, not exploit our data for profit and power.

Privacy International has been researching how emergency welfare responses have been handled in different countries in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the variety of socio-economic and political contexts of the countries researched, PI has found that a lot of them share common concerning elements along the benefit disbursement process, namely the automation of eligibility processes, lack of transparency, excessive data collection, security issues in disbursement methods and more.

• Working from home bolstered the use of remote surveillance software to monitor employees.
• It's not only tools that are developed specifically for surveillance, traditional productivity suites might also enable an intrusive level of monitoring.
• PI and UCL students looked into Office 365 and found features that can enable employers to access all communications and activities on Microsoft services
• These features can be operated without the employees' knowledge and there seems to be a lack of transparency for users in terms of what data is collected and for what purpose