Examples of Abuse Timeline
-
DroneAcharya, which has recently merged with drone technology start-up AVPL International, has been awarded a contract worth 1.87m Indian Rupees ($21, 660) by the Indian Ministry of Defence. The agreement involves hardware and training for the piloting of drones. This will enhance the Indian
-
The contract will run until 2031, and will provide the US Air Force with drones (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) which can serve multiple purposes, including mimicking enemy drones, data collection, and military strikes. These drones will enable enhanced surveillance by the US military. Firestorm will be
-
The US Army has chosen to extend its relationship with Palantir for up to four years for use of its 'Vantage' system as its main data platform. The Army Data Platform uses Palantir software to process data and utilises Artificial Intelligence (AI), significantly enhancing surveillance capabilities
-
The Agreement between the Chief Digital AI Office of the USDOD and Anduril is worth $100 million, and uses the latter's software 'Lattice Mesh' to expand the 'mesh' within the US military ecosystem. Anduril has stated that this will allow the delivery of critical data which will enable real-time
-
Anduril has been awarded a 5 year contract to weave in its Lattice software into the US Space Force's Space Surveillance Network (SSN), which monitors objects in space. The agreement will enable swift data sharing between space sensors, repositories, and personnel, and will allow the quick
-
With the stated aim of improving the security of satellite communication, a multinational partnership of companies involved in space engineering has partnered with the European Space Agency (ESA) to operationalise the Quantum Key Distribution Satellite (QKDSat) owned by Honeywell. The UK Space
-
The US Department of Defense has awarded a contract worth almost $250 million to Anduril Industries for more than 500 Roadrunner-Ms as well as Pulsar electronic warfare capabilities, with AI-enabled systems, to counter the threat of attacks using unmanned aerial systems in “priority regions”
-
Under a new contract effective from October 2024 to December 2025, PureTech Systems, which specialises in geospatial AI-boosted video analytics, will deploy its command-and-control software in 22,600 square kilometers of the US border. The software will integrate the sensors attached to existing
-
The US Air Force will give Capella Space Corp $15 million in funding to improve and scale its synthetic aperture radar to deliver enhanced resolution imagery. Capella also supplies technology to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, US Navy, US Space Force, and
-
As part of an agreement worth up to $20.8 million, Teledyne FLIR Defense will deliver ultra long-range multi-spectral imaging surveillance systems, or Star SAFIRE 380-HLD, to the Japan Maritime Defense Force, which will integrate them into the licenced Japan-based production version of the Sikorsky
-
With the use of ChatGPT already well established among students technology companies are coaching teachers on using AI tools to save substantial time on tasks such as grading, providing student feedback, and planning lessons, which reports say take up to 50 hours a week. Teachers are uncertain
-
After Uber refused requests to adjust prices following a rise in the cost of fuel, Kenya's Organisation of Online Drivers union of about 15,000 began circulating its own chart listing fares about 50% higher than Uber's official prices. Members using it are prioritising customers who pay by cash or M
-
More than 1,000 motorcycle taxi drivers in Indonesia for the ride-sharing company GoTo and the ride-hailing and food delivery company Grab have begun a strike. The drivers are calling on the government to grant them a larger percentage of trip revenues and improved employment status. Together, Grab
-
The Los Angeles school district turned off “Ed”, a $6 million chatbot, after the company paid to develop it got into financial trouble. The incident provides a cautionary tale for Britain’s new Labour government, which has talked of using AI in schools to free up teacher time and revive public
-
The UK's new Labour government are giving AI models special access to the Department of Education's bank of resources in order to encourage technology companies to create better AI tools to reduce teachers' workloads. A competition for the best ideas will award an additional £1 million in
-
Fifty-five percent of US parents say they need financial help to buy the technology their children need for school, according to a survey conducted by EcoATM Gazelle, which sells refurbished devices. Link: [Parents are going into credit card debt buying back-to-school tech, survey says](https://qz
-
Uber has been fined €290 million in the Netherlands for sending European taxi drivers' data to the US without appropriate safeguards in violation of the EU's GDPR. The Dutch data protection authority, which adjudicated a complaint originally filed in France on behalf of more than 170 drivers there
-
About 30 Brazilian delivery drivers for Deliveroo and Uber Eats in Bristol, UK have resorted to living in encampments due to rapidly rising rents and low, if not below, minimum wage. Gig workers have reported increasingly harsh living conditions and long hours with low pay, leading to worsening
-
Uber and Bolt users in South Africa and Nigeria have been booking hoax rides in each other's country and pranking gig workers to express their anger after the beauty pageant contestant Chidimma Adetshina controversially pulled out of the Miss South Africa pageant and then agreed to appear in a
-
Like around 1,500 other school districts, Columbus City Schools, the largest school district in the US state of Ohio, has begun partnering with the Texas-based safety technology company Gaggle. Gaggle monitors students’ devices for signs of potential concerns such as self-harm, depression, or
-
The Delhi government is expected to introduce facial recognition in schools in order to improve attendance, which is hovering at 65-70%. The government also proposes to provide parents with monthly attendance reports and introduce monthly and weekly tests in order to keep students engaged. Educators
-
Under a new contract, Planet Labs PBC will provide the NATO Communications and Information Agency's Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space programme (APSS) with satellite data to aid in detailed tracking and analysis of foreign military activities and fill intelligence gaps. APSS is a multi
-
Amazon is calling for the dismissal of a complaint issued by the National Labor Relations Board after two warehouse workers in the US state of Georgia claimed they faced retaliation, surveillance, and questioning after they led employee complaints about policy changes. Amazon, in common with other
-
Almost half of all job seekers are using AI tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini to help them write CVs and cover letters and complete assessments, flooding employers and recruiters with applications in an already-tight market. Managers have said they can spot giveaways that applicants used AI, such as
-
Schools in New Jersey and Wisconsin are installing Singlewire Software’s Visitor Aware, visitor management software that includes facial recognition and ID scanning, and collects visitors’ names, ID documents, date of birth, address, gender, and a facial photo, which it uses to check against the
-
An assessment camp for disabled children who attend government schools run by the Samagra Shiksha integrated scheme for education in the Indian state of Telagana required eligible children to bring with them a state government-issued disability certificate indicating a more than 40% disability, two
-
Google has settled a case brought in 2020 by the parents of an Illinois girl who sued the company in state court alleging that it had violated two sections of the Biometric Information Privacy Act. The case also alleged that Google had violated the law by failing to obtain parental consent to
-
Over the years, Urban Company, which in 2014 offered women economic independence in India, a country that has very low female participation in the workforce, has increasingly removed flexibility and autonomy for its workers while raising the cost of getting started as a worker on the app to the
-
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has reprimanded the Chelmer Valley High School in Chelmsford, Essex for unlawfully implementing facial recognition technology in its canteen. The school failed to perform a data protection information assessment, and didn't get adequate permission to
-
Los Angeles schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho is appointing a task force to find out what went wrong and how to move forward with an AI chatbot intended to issue advice and create individual acceleration plans for every student. The company, AllHere, has apparently collapsed financially, but
-
In a novel class action suit, Derek Mobley, who is Black and over 40, has claimed he was passed over for more than 100 jobs at companies that use Workday's AI recruitment software to select candidates for interviews, alleging that it uses data from companies' existing workforce without accounting
-
In an interview conducted by the Los Angeles Unified School District’s investigative team, Chris Whiteley, the former senior director of software engineering at AllHere, explained his concerns with the security and privacy aspects of the design of “Ed”, an AI chatbot intended to assist students
-
The Australian Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner is investigating the University of Melbourne for violating privacy laws by using surveillance to identify students sitting in protest against the war in Gaza. Twenty-one student protesters have been served with "general misconduct"
-
Los Angeles public schools have turned off an AI chatbot custom-designed to help parents and children navigate the school system after only three months because AllHere, which created it, mostly shut down. The information the chatbot dispensed is still available on the school’s platform, and the
-
In June 2024 civil society called on the Kenyan government to ensure that the Internet remained accessible when outages coincided with ongoing protests and reports that security agencies are using technology to locate and abduct protesters. https://www.article19.org/resources/kenya-guarantee
-
The Swedish Defence Materiel Administration has awarded Saab a $245 million contract to provide the Swedish air force with a third GlobalEye surveillance aircraft and other services like those already in use in UAE. The contract runs until 2029. The air force is accelerating the schedule for
-
In June 2024 Israeli authorities amped up its response to protests with more arrests, more violent arrests, and water cannons that have injured protesters, according to the legal aid organisation Otef Atsurim. Police have also been seen photographing cars, and some protesters say they have been
-
Both global and US investment in edtech has dropped sharply since its peak in 2021, when Coursera, Udemy, and Duolingo all went public, even though both enrollment numbers and adoption of edtech are increasing. India's BYJU provides an example: valued peaked at $22 billion in 2022, in 2024 its value
-
Internal conflicts within Israel as the government undermined democracy by politicising the courts and the civil service offered Hamas the opportunity to mount the October 7 attacks. The government has also asked the security agency Shin Bet to use its tools to help deter the protest movement, but
-
For months after February 2024, police in Atlanta, Georgia began conducting round-the-clock surveillance for months on people and homes linked to opposition to a 171-acre police training center under construction known as "cop city". Concentrated in 12 homes in four neighbourhoods, the surveillance
-
Following protests by residents of Dege county, government representatives visited homes in two villages due to be relocated to make way for the Kamtok hydropower dam. Cadres visited thousands of other villages looking for potential security risks and studying conflicts. Door-to-door visits collect
-
Israel has conducted a decade-long secret attack on the International Criminal Court that allegedly included the use of its intelligence agencies to hack, surveil, pressure, smear, and threaten senior ICC staff in order to interfere with the court's inquiries. Israel has denied the allegations. In
-
In May 2024 three men were charged in London with gathering intelligence for Hong Kong and forcing entry into a residence in Britain. One of them was found soon afterwards dead in a park while out on bail. The arrests raised awareness of the concerns of Hong Kong activists who have moved to London
-
Ontario allocates $30 million to install new security technologies and vape detectors, expanding their surveillance apparatus whilst contributing to an overall cut in funding per student. Some of the vape detectors installed in Canadian schools include noise detectors, however there is a lack of
-
In moves compared to the McCarthy era of "reds under the bed" censorship, US counter-terrorism authorities often investigate political speech at borders and elsewhere. Both major political parties have a long history of conflating activism in favour of Palestinian rights with terrorism. https://www
-
The UK's Department of Education intends to appoint a project team to test edtech against set criteria to choose the highest-quality and most useful products. Extra training will be offered to help teachers develop enhanced skills. Critics suggest it would be better to run a consultation first to
-
A new report finds that unlawful police surveillance of peaceful protesters in the Netherlands is undermining the right to privacy and chilling protest, and violating both national laws and international human rights law. Police are frequently using their discretionary powers to demand to see ID
-
Workers at a St Peters, Missouri Amazon warehouse have filed an unfair labour practice charge with the US National Labor Relations Board alleging that Amazon has interfered with employees' right to unionise by intrusively surveilling them. Constant video and audio recording analysed by AI enables
-
Documents released under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act show that as pro-Palestine protests have escalated, Yale has in tandem increased its tactics for monitoring student dissent. Among them: the police have surveilled student social media accounts, sent administrators to rallies, and
-
Israel based company, High Lander, is providing demos of its system, called Orion, to U.S. police departments, suggesting the drones can help in law enforcement, including by performing video surveillance, searching for people or vehicles using AI and thermal sensors. https://theintercept.com/2024
-
After the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade leaked in 2022, the social media monitoring company Dataminr sent regular alerts to the US Marshals Service with times and places of pending pro-choice protests and rallies and many other protests. As a partner of Twitter, Dataminr
-
Analysis of 700,000 documents obtained in a public records lawsuit show that the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department in collaboration with federal law enforcement characterised racial justice protesters and activists in 2020 and 2021 as threats based on information gathered from social
-
US states are turning to obscure laws banning masks in public, typically passed in the 1940s and 1950s in response to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, to target people wearing face coverings while protesting the war in Gaza. In Ohio, the attorney general warned the state's 14 public universities that
-
An international student in Sydney, Australia, who has participated in demonstrations criticising the Chinese Community Party reports that his parents in China have been threatened by police and that the social media accounts he uses to communicate with friends and family back home have been
-
A new report finds that Chinese and Hong Kong authorities are retaliating against Chinese student activists in Europe and North America in numerous ways: they are being surveilled both online and offline, and their families in China are being threatened by local police. The 32 students interviewed
-
Police set up cameras pointing directly at the pro-Palestine encampment at the University of Toronto's King's College Circle, leading protesters to claim they are solely for the purpose of monitoring them. Both police and the university denied that new surveillance had been put in placce. https:/
-
In the controversy-filled leadup to the Eurovision final, Swedish authorities set up one of the country's largest-ever security efforts. They constructed a fence around the Malmö Arena and sent up drones to patrol the city with cameras. Police, who usually carry handguns, were equipped with heavier
-
At a trans rights protest in October 2023, campus security told students occupying a lecture theater at Edinburgh University that they would use the Eduroam wifi to identify them. The university says it has never used wifi data this way, and its security team denies threatening students. However, a
-
Eighteen hours after Columbia University's Hamilton Hall students occupied a building as part of a pro-Palestine protest, police moved in, arrested dozens of people on charges of burglary and trespassing, and removed the encampments. The administration gave the students, whose primary demand was
-
Based on documents released in response to a FOIA request, the Federa Protective Service, a law enforcement agency within the US Department of Homeland Security that monitors nearly 10,000 government facilities, warned officials that increasingly widespread pro-Palestinian protests could attract
-
Facial recognition is changing the nature of protest, as participants wear keffiyehs and face masks in order to hide their identities from the video cameras ubiquitous on university campuses. Student protesters have long asked schools not to use facial recognition on campus because of the damage
-
US students demonstrating over the war in Gaza wear masks and blankets to block counter-protesters from filming them or posting them images online hoping to identify them, as has happened repeatedly since the protests began. In some places, university policies or state laws ban wearing masks, even
-
Documents obtained under a FOIA request show that Washington, DC police have for years used online surveillance tools to monitor social media activity, collect data on individual users and their social graphs, and monitor public protests. The police departments using these techniques offer little
-
Fusion Technology will earn $159.8 million over 5 years to work with the US FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS). It will support the FBI in developing the National Data Exchange ("an investigative tool for agencies to search, analyze, and share criminal justice information"), the Law
-
Those wishing to reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, due for renewal in April 2024, frequently cited abuses of the law to spy on protesters within the US. Nonetheless, the law was reauthorised with new and expanded surveillance powers that could expand warrantless
-
L3Harris is contracted by the U.S. Space Force to develop space surveillance information though a programme known as MOSSAIC (the Maintenance Of Space Situational Awareness Integrated Capabilities). The program is said to provide space surveillance information for military, civil and commercial
-
Following a February 2024 ruling by the Information Commissioner's Office against Serco Leisure, national leisure centre chains are among dozens of UK companies removing or reviewing the use of facial recognition and fingerprints to monitor staff attendance. The ICO found that the Serco subsidiary
-
The Argentinian startup Nippy offers delivery drivers access to rest stops including free coffee, phone charging stations, and toilets in return for downloading its app and allowing it to sell the data the app collects to partners in insurance, financial services, and telecommunications. The result
-
Westminster Group PLC has ratified a ten-year, multi-million-pound contract to supply ground security operations and advanced detection, surveillance, and screening equipment, as well as maintenance, training, and support at one domestic and four international airports in the Democratic Republic of
-
Microsoft pitched the use of OpenAI's DALL-E software to support battlefield operations of the US Department of Defense, in seeming contravention of OpenAI's ban against working in the military field. One of the potential use cases proposed by Microsoft is to use DALL-E, OpenAI's image generation
-
On behalf of the Norwegian government, the Norwegian Intelligence Service has awarded Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace (“Kongsberg”) a four-year contract to supply satellite maritime surveillance data in order to cover Norwegian Areas of Interest. Kongsberg will produce three satellites and equip
-
It has been announced that the California Highway Patrol has signed a $1.6 million (for the first year) contract with Flock Safety to install 480 high-tech cameras on Oakland's streets and freeways to identify licence plates and catalogue passing vehicles by make, model, colour, and other features
-
The ACLU of Maine has criticised the Caribou school district and the Pennsylvania-based biometric education company IdentiMetrics for mishandling a contract by not laying out clear plans for protecting student data. The contract was to supply a biometric finger scanner to track student attendance
-
Metropolitan Police used live facial recognition and attacked a crowd of trans rights campaigners, solidarity activists and anti-fascists protesting a conference on conversion therapy. Participants report being sprayed in their faces with PAVA at close range and subjected to personal physical
-
Spreading facial recognition technology - according to figures from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, government agencies in 78 countries use facial recognition systems - is changing the risk of participating in protests by making it impossible to count on being anonymous or in a group
-
Chinese students and newly graduated activists in London report that they frequently see middle-aged Chinese men at protests watching them without participating, report getting strange calls, and say their families have been threatened by local authorities in China. Experts say they may be
-
The UK's political and cultural institutions are increasingly joining the police and private intelligence companies in tracking peaceful activists without transparency or accountability. The intelligence company Welund lists among its customers BP and many other oil and gas giants, as well as public
-
Skeptics at an education conference pushed parents to question AI vendors' pitches instead of gambling children's privacy for promises of increased on-campus safety. Even so, schools are increasingly upgrading surveillance systems to incorporate AI and biometrics in the name of safety. Link to
-
Student protesters accused Harvard administrators of attempting to surveil and identify students participating in a vigil for 100-plus Palestinians who died under Israeli attack while awaiting humanitarian aid. Current Harvard policy prohibits classroom disruptions, and lowered tolerance for protest
-
The Utah State Board of Education has approved a $3 million contract with Utah-based AEGIX Global that will let K-12 schools in the state apply for funding for AI gun detection software from ZeroEyes for up to four cameras per school. The software will work with the schools' existing camera systems
-
The United School Administrators of Kansas, who represent more than 2,000 administrators in the state, are partnering with Seattle-based Indicio to install its Indicio Proven product, which will issue and verify transcripts and other records with ID verification. Link to article Publication
-
The United School Administrators of Kansas, who represent more than 2,000 administrators in the state, are partnering with Seattle-based Indicio to install its Indicio Proven product, which will issue and verify transcripts and other records with ID verification. Link to article Publication
-
New rules rolled out by India's app-based home services platform Urban Company require its more than 52,000 workers to maintain ratings of a minimum of 4.7 (out of 5), accept 70% of job leads, and cancel only four jobs a month. The company says the rules are intended to improve customer experience
-
Numerous research efforts are developing facial recognition systems for use in classrooms. In one example, researchers at Guilford College are designing a system for classroom management that will use multiple cameras to take attendance, monitor students’ activities, and detect their emotional
-
The Newport-Mesa [California] Unified School District Board of Education approved a new AI-enhanced surveillance system from Everon LLC (formerly ADT Commercial) that includes automated cameras, software that can spot after-hours intruders, read car licence plates, and monitor for signs of
-
The UK government has proposed legislation to allow police to search the database of driver's licence photos with facial recognition software to identify criminal suspects. People applying for licences have not consented to being included in this "permanent police lineup", the victims of mistakes
-
Section 702 of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, due to expire in April 2024 unless renewed, is intended to allow intelligence agencies to surveil foreigners overseas but under the rubric of "foreign influence" or "foreign intelligence gathering" can easily be abused to surveil Americans
-
Some UK schools have bought and installed sensors in toilets that 'actively listen' to pupils' conversations to try to detect keywords spoken by pupils. The sensors are being sold to detect vaping, bullying, and other problems. However, privacy campaigners say these sensors are potentially a
-
The Spanish data protection regulator AEPD has fined Glovo €550,000 for excessively surveilling delivery drivers and failing to protect their data from abuse by company personnel in other countries. The data includes details of each delivery, all communications exchanged with the platform, and
-
The newly appointed DGP in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh has said he intends to focus on people-centric and artificial intelligence-based predictive policing to identify high-risk areas so that police can anticipate and prevent crimes. He has also named cybercrime as a priority. Uttar Pradesh
-
The Dutch data protection authority has fined Uber €10 million for failing to inform drivers how long it retains their data or how it secures it when sending it to countries outside the EEA, and hindering drivers' access to their data by making requests unnecessarily complicated. The fine follows a
-
Leaked messages show that Shirion Collective, a pro-Israel surveillance network that claims its "Maccabee" AI tool can identify and track targets, is branching out from the UK to Australia. The group, like others such as Canary Mission, claims to fight antisemitism, mostly by identifying individuals
-
A summary of Karen Levy's 2023 book Data Driven, which studies the installation of electronic logging devices in the cabs of US truckers, removing much of their traditional autonomy. Nominally installed to improve safety, the devices actually are making trucking less safe by pushing experienced
-
French data protection agency CNIL has fined Amazon's French warehouse management unit €32 million, or about 3% of its turnover, for its "excessively intrusive" surveillance of the performance of its thousands of staff. The system relied on data collected from the scanners warehouse staff use to
-
Police in Queensland photographed peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters in Logan in December 2023 and recorded the licence plate numbers of cars displaying Palestinian flags. When politicians and others objected, police defended the practice by saying that some threats require "significant threat and
-
A study conducted by neuroscientists based on a sample of 59 children aged ten to 12, the period critical in reading development, finds that paper has a clear advantage over screens for “deeper reading”. The work aligns with other research conducted by social scientists with similar findings
-
At recent rallies, London's Metropolitan police have ramped up use of facial recognition technology to scan pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters, claiming that some of the signs, banners, and chants heard at these protests stray into religious or racial offences. Following the protests held
-
A platform that will serve as a central data repository for India's One Nation One Student ID is due to start operation in February 2024. The 12-digit student ID (Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry) is liked to students' Aadhaar biometric IDs and has so far been issued to 20 million
-
Trailing well after their European counterparts, US and Canadian trade unions are just now beginning to push for protections against workplace surveillance. The Communications Workers of America has won requirements that managers notify workers when recording their calls and a guarantee that those
-
The FBI is using databases of location data and facial recognition technology to automate finding and charging participants in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol who have so far escaped identification and arrest. Few legal protections stand in the way of this type of digital surveillance. The
-
The data protection officer for Rhineland-Pfalz says that parental agreement is not required when schools use ChatGPT, even when the students are underage. However, the terms and conditions attached to OpenAI’s licence for third parties for ChatGPT say parents must give consent. Link: Datenschützer
-
Liberty has challenged the use of a statutory instrument to bring in new restrictions on protests even though the same provisions had been rejected months earlier in the House of Lords. The new law allows police to impose conditions on a protest if it causes "more than minor" hindrances or delays
-
Schools in Hyderabad, the capital of the Indian state of Telangana, are using facial recognition to take morning attendance. Telangana is also using facial recognition to pay pensions, renew driving licences, evoting, and deter crime. Adoption was partly fueled by fear of spreading covid-19 through
-
New security guidelines are designed to let the incoming government in Argentina crack down on expected protests after it devalued the country's currency by more than 50% in December 2023 as part of a plan to cut the national deficit and bring down inflation. The guidelines include a plan to
-
Between October 7 and December 4 2023 the New York City Police Department used drones at least 13 times to make 239 arrests at pro-Palestine protests, and more than tripled its use of drones in the previous year. Police have handed over the drone footage as evidence in 158 cases where protesters
-
Preparations for COP28, held in the UAE, where protests are rarely allowed, included concerns that environmental protesters would be surveilled and/or arrested despite plans to provide designated areas managed by the UN where peaceful assembly would be allowed. Activists wanted to denounce the UAE's
-
In preparing to host COP28, the UAE, where individuals may be prosecuted for unauthorised protests, speech deemed to spark or encourage social unrest, or offending foreign states, said it would designate areas of the site where it would permit demonstrations. Campaigners remained concerned that
-
The European Legal Support Centre has documented 24 incidents in which UK-based pro-Palestinian academic staff and students, especially Palestinians, and people of colour, have been reported to the police, the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, and university disciplinary committees. Overall, ELSC
-
US data analytics firm Palantir, known for its numerous contracts with intelligence agencies, military forces, or law enforcement and immigration authorities, has been awarded a £330m contract to run a new mass database for the UK's health service (NHS). The deal comes four years after Palantir was
-
In response to a case brought by three Italian trade unions, a court in Palermo has ruled that the points system used by the Italian food delivery service Foodinho discriminates against disabled and older riders, as well as those with special family or personal circumstances. A subsidiary of Spain's
-
Former delivery driver Edrissa Manjang is pursuing a claim for harassment, indirect discrimination, and victimisation in UK courts, alleging that a racially-biased algorithm kicked him off Uber Eats' ride-sharing app. After Uber Eats supplied information that contradicted Manjang's original claims
-
Content moderators working in the south Asian IT hub Hyderabad say their work reviewing still and video images of sexual and violent content is straining their mental health. Paid less than £8 a day, the moderators say the wellness coaches the company supplies do little beyond moving them to a less
-
The 746 KGBV schools in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh say the schools’ facial recognition attendance system has helped improve both students’ and teachers’ attendance. KGBVs are residential schools intended to educate girls from impoverished backgrounds. Link: Face-recognition Tech helps KGBV in
-
New York state governor Kathy Hochul has announced $75 million in additional funding for surveillance technology and staff to be used to target pro-Palestinian protesters and activists, describing the move as fighting anti-semitism. The news came a day after the Biden administration announced new
-
Students at Columbia walked out during a number of classes, including a lecture delivered by Hillary Clinton as part of her global affairs class, to protest the university's alleged role in "shaming" pro-Palestinian protesters. The protesters demanded immediate legal support for students whose
-
In November 2023, as protests over the Israel-Hamas war ramped up, the UK's Met Commissioner announced police would analyse social media and use facial recognition searches to identify and detain "troublemakers" committing hate crimes or supporting banned terror organisations. To date, 70-80
-
Despite under-funding basic services such as health care and education, governments in Nigeria, Ghana, Morococo, Malawi, and Zambia collectively spend over $1 billion a year on digital surveillance technologies supplied by companies in the US, UK, China, the EU, and Israel. Nigeria alone spends $12
-
A new report finds that Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Malawi and Zambia collectively spend over $1 billion annually on digital surveillance technologies, including mobile phone spyware, internet interception devices, and biometric identity systems, as well as social media monitoring, AI-powered facial
-
FullScreen Research claims that in the competitive German food delivery market, Lieferando uses automation to monitor its employees and that Wolt violates labour laws by paying couriers in cash and employing them illegally A former supervisor with Lieferando says that the system flags up
-
Uber Eats delivery drivers in northern French cities went on strike on October 22, 2023 to protest falling wages since the platform changed its policies to effectively reduce its per-kilometre compensation. Drivers complain the platform is less transparent since the changes. https://actu.fr/economie
-
Tensions at educational institutions across the US following the the opening of the Israel-Hama conflict in Gaza on October 7 are accompanied by student concerns, particularly among those protesting the mass killing of Palestinians, that their speech is being intensely policed. Conscious of the
-
Companies like the Australian data services company Appen are part of a vast, hidden industry of low-paid workers in some of the globe's cheapest labour markets who label images, video, and text to provide the datasets used to train the algorithms that power new bots. Appen, which has 1 million
-
Foodinho, the Italian food delivery subsidiary of the Spanish company Glovo, continues to accumulate millions of euros in fines for infringements of labour law such as collecting and misusing riders' data. New research studying Glovo's app indicates that the company appears to have created its own
-
When the Los Angeles Police Department opted to monitor the messages posted in forums on Neighbors, a companion app to Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras, the system forwarded over 13,000 messages in just over two years. Research shows, however, that this type of surveillance does a poor job of
-
Police in Western Australia have demanded that ABC hand over all the footage of climate protesters it collected in preparing a programme ("Four Corners") about them. More than 40 civil society groups have opposed the request, saying that the demand undermines press freedom and urging the broadcaster
-
A survey commissioned by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office finds that a fifth of UK adults believe they have been monitored by an employer. Timekeeping and access were most commonly tracked, followed by emails, files, calls, or messages. Seventy percent said they would find such monitoring
-
Myanmar's ruling junta has begun a pilot census in 20 townships across the country, and has said that a national census needs to be completed in 2024 before new elections take place, which could be in 2025. Critics warn that the census will be used to increase surveillance of opponents, including
-
During the runup to the 2023 general election, the Zimbabwean government sent drones to monitor a rally organised by the Citizens Coalition for Change. The country also uses drones to monitor motorists, control the border, and limit crime; officials in the Kavango Zambezi Transnational Park have
-
A BBC investigation found more than 150 cases in which UK police abused their body-worn cameras by deleting footage, turning them off when using force, and sharing videos on WhatsApp, other social media, or in person. The cameras, which have cost at least £90 million over the last decade, were
-
The three Democratic members of the five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Board, an independent agency within the federal branch of the US government, have recommended that the FBI and other government agencies should be required to obtain the approval of a court before reviewing the
-
The New York State Department of Education has prohibited schools in New York State from purshasing or using facial recognition technology. Schools can use other types of biometric identifying technology as long as they consider the privacy implications. Article: New York State bans facial
-
The Taliban could repurpose a plan devised by the Americans before their 2021 departure for a four-year programme to create a large-scale camera network to surveil Afghan cities, The capital, Kabul, already has thousands of cameras. The Taliban administration has also consulted with Huawei about
-
New research shows that schools' scramble to adopt new technologies in schools have given for-profit companies a massive opening into the data of young people's everyday lives and created an $85 billion industry that has brought security and privacy risks for all concerned. Schools, meanwhile, lack
-
In the year after protests began in Iran in September 2022, Telegram has emerged as the social medium of choice for both the protesters and the regime they oppose. The Iranian authorities have been able to use Telegram to identify and shame protesters and broadcast false confessions, as well as
-
The Israeli government is bringing forward a bill that would permit the police to place facial recognition cameras in public places, including at events such as protests, as long as a police officer is convinced that the cameras' operation does not present undue invasion of any individual's privacy
-
Four French trade unions representing drivers signed an agreement with ride-hailing platforms to provide drivers with a minimum income and provide greater transparency regarding suspending and terminating drivers. Platforms must now give drivers a chance to respond before deactivating their accounts
-
Based on a facial recognition match, the New York City Police Department sent more than 50 officers to besiege the home of a racial justice organiser, claiming he had shouted in an officer's ear at a protest in the summer of 2020. The officers were unable to produce a warrant when asked, but
-
Google is working to extend the lifespan of Chromebooks by providing software updates for up to a decade. The new policy, which will begin in 2024, will ensure that no current Chromebook expires in the next two years. The expiration dates were proving expensive for schools, which were having to
-
The facial recognition system the Indian state of Telangana intends to adopt for taking attendance in schools will be AI-enhanced, eliminate the paper register via an Android app, serve 2.6 million students in 26,000 schools, and be extended to teachers after it has been successfully implemented for
-
Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 between 2009 and 2014, set up a meeting between Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, John Manzoni, in 2019; a year later the US-based company was awarded a £27 million contract to process border and customs data without competitive
-
An app used by more than 100 Bristol schools has raised concern among criminal justice and anti-racism campaigners that the easy access it gives safeguarding leads to pupils' and their families' contacts with police, child protection, and welfare services risks increasing discrimination against
-
A paper links depth of semantic encoding (which is important for reading comprehension) to reading text on paper rather than on a screen. This link was made after studying high-density EEG (which records brain activity) while 59 middle school students completed single-word semantic judgment tasks
-
Chromebooks, which many schools purchased at the beginning of the pandemic because of their lower cost compared to PCs and Macs, are proving expensive as their prices rise, the cost of repairs bites, and Google's expiration policy means many models are about to become e-waste. A study from US PIRG
-
An investigation finds that using search tools provided by the College Board, the organisation that administers SATs and Advanced Placement exams for university-bound students, prompts it to send details of SAT scores, grade point averages, and other data to Facebook, TikTik, and other companies via
-
Fairplay and the Center for Digital Democracy are asking the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google and YouTube are violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and the terms of a 2019 settlement agreement by serving children personalised ads on videos labelled "made for
-
Following a report from Human Rights Watch, The Public Ministry of São Paolo began an investigation to find out whether government education platforms and services collected students' personal data and sent it to adtech companies in violation of the General Data Protection Law. Article: São Paolo
-
Cellebrite, which provides technology to unlock phones and access their data, asks its government agency customers to keep both its technology and the fact that they used it secret, a leaked company training video shows. Such a request violates the rights of the public to expect that authorities are
-
Authorities in Germany and France are using legal powers intended for use against organised crime and extremist groups to crack down on direct action protests intended to spur public action against climate change. State authorities in Germany are preventively detaining protesters, in one case
-
Education experts and publishers in Brazil are warning of the negative consequences of a decision by the São Paolo state government to replace textbooks with ebooks for students over 14 starting in 2024. Many students have no Internet access, and publishers argue it will irreparably damage the
-
The ACLU, NAACP, and other civil rights and civil liberties organisations have called on the US Department of Homeland Security to investigate intelligence gathering at "Cop City", a plan to build a police and fire department training centre in a forest near Atlanta, Georgia. More than 40
-
The UK Home Office has renewed its 3 year long contract with Tekever to provide maritime surveillance as a service across the English Channel using its AR5 and AR3 model drones, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The AR5 system is a UAV that is intended to conduct surveillance missions
-
Despite mass demonstrations in 2022 supporting women's right to bare their heads, Iranian authorities are considering a draft law that proposes prison terms of five to ten years (up from ten days to two months) for women to refuse to wear the hijab, substantial fines for businesses and celebrities
-
The Biden administration has recommended the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, warning that not doing so could constitute "one of the worst intelligence failures of our time". S702 allows the US government to collect the digital communications of foreigners living
-
The UK Home Office has drawn up secret plans to draft a letter lobbying the Information Commissioner's Office to allow the privately held company Facewatch's matching service to spread into retail shops and supermarkets across Britain in order to curb shoplifting. The strategy was agreed in a
-
Human raters have played a significant role in the rapid improvement in the machine learning models that fuel modern AI. The raters evaluate the algorithmic output of search engines and AI chatbots and provide "Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback" (RLHF) – the technical name for the
-
A coalition of 65 NGOs including Access Now, EFF, and Article 19, have written a letter asking the European Commission to reject the possibility that content moderation provisions in the Digital Services Act could be used to compel social media shutdowns. The letter was in response to comments by
-
The rise of hybrid work has led to a rise in "bossware": increasingly intrusive technology that monitors employees, tracks their locations, and watches or listens to office workers via cameras and microphones. 90% of such systems can give employers a list of everything a worker has done that day
-
In response to a damning report from Jonathan Hall KC, the reviewer of the UK's terrorism legislation, the Metropolitan Police referred to the Independent Office of Police Conduct the case of radical French publisher Ernest Moret. When Moret arrived at St Pancras station in London for a book fair in
-
Numerous video clips from Amazon's in-van driver-facing surveillance cameras are appearing on Reddit in violence of Amazon's stated privacy policies and raising questions about drivers' privacy. The videos are clearly not being posted by drivers themselves, but come from inside Amazon delivery
-
Four people in Kenya have filed a petition calling on the government to investigate conditions for contractors reviewing the content used to train large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. They allege that these are exploitative and have left some former contractors traumatized. The petition
-
Outsourced artists, designers, copywriters, software developers, and call centre operators in the global south are the first to feel the effects of the arrival of generative AI, as client companies see the new technology as a way of cutting costs. Some workers are adding prompt engineering to their
-
A former TikTok moderator in Kenya has threatened a lawsuit against TikTok's owner, ByteDance, alleging that he has developed PTSD as a result of his work for the company and that he was unfairly dismissed for advocating for better working conditions. In a letter, his lawyer alleges that the job
-
Thousands of cameras made by Bosch are part of a surveillance network on the streets of Tehran that clerical rulers are using to track women who refuse to cover their heads in public. Amnesty International reports that women whose bare heads are detected receive text messages threatening them with
-
A former executive at Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, has said in a filing relating to a wrongful dismissal lawsuit that the members of Chinese Communist Party maintained a backdoor channel to access TikTok user data belonging to Hong Kong protesters and civil rights activists in order to try to
-
The UK's Northamptonshire Police used live facial recognition technology for the first time at the 2023 Formula 1 British Grand Prix in order to spot people who pose a "risk of danger to the wider public" such as wanted criminals, or people involved in serious crime or "unlawful protest"
-
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that the use of facial recognition technology to arrest protester Nikolay Glukhin on the Moscow metro system was "incompatible with the ideals and values of a democratic society governed by the rule of law". Glukhin's protest consisted of travelling
-
Hong Kong authorities seeking to ensure the complete removal of the popular pro-democracy protest song "Glory to Hong Kong" from search results got an injunction against Google after the technology giant refused to remove it without a court order. The authorities say in the writ that they are
-
Munich's public prosecutor has confirmed that since October 2022 the Bavarian authorities have been tapping communications of the Last Generation climate activist group, including phones, emails, and voicemails on suspicion that the group is forming or supporting a criminal organisation. Last
-
Behind every powerful AI system are huge numbers of people labelling and clarifying data to train it, contracted by companies like Remotasks, a subsidiary of Silicon Valley-based data vendor Scale AI, whose customers include the US military and OpenAI. Often the workers, who are assigned tasks they
-
UK government ministers are seeking to ensure schools benefit financially from any future use of pupils’ data by large language models such as those behind ChatGPT and Google Bard. Data from the national pupil database is already available to third-party organisations. The BCS head of education
-
A new poll from the trade union Prospect finds that 58% of UK workers believe government should protect jobs by regulating the use of generative AI. Only 12% believe government should not interfere. The poll also found that workers are deeply uncomfortable with being surveilled at work and about
-
Employees monitored by monitoring tools such as Hubstaff, CleverControl, and FlexiSPY report that the software takes a screenshot every ten minutes and calculate an activity score based on how they type and move their mouse. Aware that employers are looking at these scores, employees pause the
-
According to police plans to enhance “school safety”, security cameras and facial recognition will monitor children in Hong Kong in class and around educational facilities. The move is part of a trend also found in China, India, and the US toward mining children’s data, even though few benefits have
-
Internal emails obtained under an FOI request show that between April and June 2022 the US Marshals Service received regular alerts from Dataminr, a company that monitors social media on behalf of corporate and government clients and an official partner of Twitter, advising them of the times and
-
Over 60 US cities and counties use Fusus, a "police technology platform that merges public and private cameras with predictive policing and other surveillance tools". Private surveillance camera owners are encouraged to enroll in a police-led program that enables the police to control these cameras
-
A heavily redacted report from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court shows that the FBI turned a tool intended for foreign surveillance under a law known as Section 702 on 278,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2021, including suspects in the January 6 insurrection and Black Lives Matter
-
London's Metropolitan Police announced it would use facial recognition to scan the crowds attending the May 2023 coronation of King Charles III. The hundreds of thousands of people expected to line the streets was an entirely new scale of use for the technology in Britain. Critics such as Liberty
-
More than 150 workers employed by third-party outsourcing companies to provide content moderation for AI tools on Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT depend have pledged to create the African Content Moderators Union. The move to create such a union began in 2019 when the outsourcing company Sama fired
-
In a case brought by NGOs before the 2023 May Day marches, administrative courts ruled that police may use drones to patrol the crowds and rejected the argument that the drones pose a serious attack to fundamental freedoms. However, a court in Rouen suspended parts of a decree that would have
-
Wisconsin schools use a racially discriminatory Dropout Early Warning System built by the state to identify incoming 9th graders who may be at risk of failing to graduate on time in order to offer them help. The system’s machine learning algorithms make their assessments based on test scores
-
A new report from Worker Info Exchange finds that drivers working for Just Eat have had their accounts abruptly de-activated by automated systems for alleged overpayments as small as £1.35, which many are contesting. Just Eat says that the overpayments were triggered because drivers had incorrectly
-
The Court of Appeals for British Columbia rejected the claim made by whistleblower Ian Linkletter that linking to freely available materials from the remote proctoring company Proctorio was legitimate criticism. The company has a history of attacking those who criticise it and its products
-
Following pilots in Nirmal and Jayashankar Bhupalpally districts, the government of the Indian state of Telangana is planning on adopting facial recognition software to manage attendance in the schools. Officials have said the system should ensure every transaction is transparent and traceable and
-
Data-driven wellbeing audits are becoming common in classrooms in Denmark, which has long invested heavily in digital teaching aids and interactive learning. In the last few decades, depression among Danish children has sextupled, and a quarter of ninth-graders report having attempted self-harm
-
In two cases brought by Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union on behalf of drivers, the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam has upheld a 2021 ruling in a lower court that under the GDPR Uber and Ola Cabs must disclose the personal information and profiling that the companies use to
-
Human Rights Watch called on the national government of Brazil to amend the country's data protection law to add new safeguards to protect children online following the discovery that seven educational webistes directed at Brazilian students, including two created by state education secretariats
-
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is using an obscure administrative subpoena called “1509”, intended for use only in criminal investigation about illegal imports or unpaid customs duty. Most requests have sought records from telecommunications companies, technology firms, money transfer
-
An administrative court in Montreil, France issued a preliminary ruling ordering the Paris-based Distance Learning Institute to suspend its use of the e-proctoring platform TestWe, which uses facial recognition and algorithmic analysis to monitor students.Video and sound analysis track students' eye
-
Police have closely monitored the first protest in Hong Kong since 2020, limiting attendees to 100 and requiring them to wear number tags and submit their banners for prior inspection. Police also set up a cordon to keep protesters separated from the media. The protest opposed a land reclamation
-
Facial recognition technology using chips from the US companies Nvidia and Intel and deployed in the Moscow underground has helped police detain and question thousands of people on the way to and returning from protests against the Russia-Ukraine war. Nvidia and Intel are not thought to have
-
ICO warns North Ayrshire Council for adopting facial recognition in schools without parental consent
The Office of the Information Commissioner has warned Scotland's North Ayrshire council that it has likely infringed data protection law by using facial recognition technology in nine schools. North Ayrshire used the iPayimpact contactless system for payment for meals, and claimed that 97% of -
The UK's Home Office is expanding its contract with the Portuguese company Tekever, which has supplied live-streamed drone footage captured by a combination of radar, video, and infrafred imagery through a £1 billion contract since 2020; this contract is now being extended to monitor large stretches
-
Months after a District Court judgment that Cleveland State University violated student privacy in requiring the use of an online proctoring service that required a scan of students' rooms, some professors California colleges were still using such software for remote exams. Privacy rights
-
Thousands of dissidents in 40 countries were imprisoned for posting or reposting social, political, or religious content on social media between June 2021 and May 2022, according to the Freedom on the Net 2022 report. The report calls China, the most repressive of the 40, "the world's worst
-
Video footage shows that security agents linked to London mayor Sadiq Khan spied on the environmental activist group Green New Deal Rising and blocked members from participating in a public debate. Information about the campaigners and their plans appears to have been shared in advance between the
-
The UK Information Commissioner's Office has reprimanded North Ayrshire council for installing iPayimpact facial recognition technology in nine schools without obtaining adequate consent. The system was intended to speed cashless lunch payments. The council withdrew the system and deleted the data
-
A security flaw in the mandatory "Diksha" app operated by the Education Ministry, which became an important tool for giving students access to coursework while at home during the pandemic, exposed the data of millions of Indian students and teachers for more than a year when a cloud server hosted on
-
An eight-country study of Amazon employees has found that 57% say the company's performance monitoring system damages their mental health, 51% (65.7% of drivers) say it's had a negative effect on their physical health, and 59% feel the monitoring is excessive. In addition, 58% say Amazon doesn't
-
The Mississippi legislature has introduced a bill that would require public schools and postsecondary institutions to install video surveillance cameras that record audio throughout their campuses, including in classrooms, auditoriums, cafeterias, gyms, hallways, recreational areas, and along each
-
In a preliminary ruling, the administrative court of Montreuil suspended the use of algorithmic e-proctoring software called TestWe after students at the Institute of Distant Study of the University of Paris 8 brought a legal case, assisted by La Quadrature du Net. The plaintiffs argued that the
-
The pro-Ukrainian hacker group NLB Team leaked the personal data of more than 17 million children and parents who used Moscow Electronic School, an online learning platform that was built by the Moscow city government in 2016 and was its primary method of delivery online education during the covid
-
In an unprecedented interim ruling, a student has provided sufficient facts to uphold a complaint that the Free University discriminated against her when its anti-cheating algorithm failed to log her in via face detection, likely due to the darker colour of her skin. The university has ten weeks to
-
The French minister of national education and youth has advised schools not to use the free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace because French public procurement contracts require payment. Paid versions may be allowed if they do not violate data protection rules, including a 2020
-
In a report, the Privacy Coimmissioner of Canada has said that online proctoring tools used to conduct remote exams fail to get sufficiently free, clear, and individual consent from students. Besides this overreach, the report identifies factors that may trigger false alerts and errors in the
-
Humans who review footage of warehouse workers flagged by Amazon’s AI computer vision system to check for employee errors - are themselves surveilled in detail to ensure they make punishing targets. The workers, who are paid as little as £212 a month to review thousands of images and videos per day
-
In a report, the Center for Democracy and Technology finds that student privacy laws are insufficient to protect students in the face of increasing use of remote education technologies and insufficient staff and other resources. CDT examined the practices of 43 local education authorities and their
-
In a study of the data Uber collected on a Geneva driver who obtained his data via a Subject Access Request, the Gig Economy Project finds that the data is difficult for drivers to parse, contains many inaccuracies, and is incomplete. In addition, obtaining the data in the first place is near
-
Drivers for app-based companies like Uber, tired of their lack of transparency, share their experience and swap tips to help each other game the platforms to their advantage via in-person workshops and Telegram groups, aided by the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers and the Telangana
-
German data protection authorities have ruled that the use of Microsoft Office 365 in schools is not compliant with GDPR, citing a lack of transparency around how and where Microsoft processes and stores student data as well as the potential for third-party access. German federal and state data
-
Ohio teenager Aaron Ogletree has won a lawsuit he filed against Cleveland State University after he was required to pan a webcam around his bedroom to eliminate possible cheating before taking a remote exam. The court agreed that Ogletree's Fourth Amendment rights were violated by the scanning
-
Technology companies that call themselves "AI first" rely on heavily surveilled gig workers who label data, deliver packages, moderate content, and perform gig work via platforms. Startups pressured by their venture capital funders even hire humans to pretend to be chatbots so they can claim to be
-
The Greek defence startup Lambda Automata is putting up "Outpost" autonomous observation towers to enhance monitoring of the country's numerous islands in the Aegean Sea, important in territorial conflicts with Turkey. The towers use computer vision algorithms to turn CCTV cameras into situational
-
At least 37 US colleges and universities, as well as numerous school district, have repurposed Social Sentinel (recently renamed Navigate360 Detect) to help campus police surveil student protests. The software is marketed as a safety tool that can scan students' social media posts and university
-
Notorious military tech company Anduril is pushing its technology to the border surveillance market. Along the US-Mexico border, its surveillance towers "use an artificial intelligence system called Lattice to autonomously identify, detect and track “objects of interest”, such as humans or vehicles
-
US parents have reported receiving an explicit and deliberately shocking image after hackers attacked the primary school learning app Seesaw. Seesaw has 10 million users, who include teachers, students, and family members. The company said the hackers had not gained administrative access, but had
-
In September 2022, the UK Department for Education announced that under a £270,000 contract with Suffolk-based Wonde Ltd it would collect data on children's school attendance and potentially share it with other government departments and third parties as part of its drive to raise attendance. A
-
A US federal judge has ruled in the case Ogiltree v. Cleveland State University that "room scans", the common requirement in remotely proctored exams to provide a 360-degree scan of the area in which students are taking tests, are an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. Often these areas
-
Workplace surveillance has become a reality in the US in every type of job from financial executives to radiologists to warehouse workers, tracking in detail how workers spend their time. Often, time spent on manual tasks does not register as working time, leading to lost pay or even lost jobs
-
During a remotely proctored online exam, a number of students on the Bar Professional Training Course urinated in bottles and buckets and wore adult diapers rather than risk the possibility that their exam would be terminated if they left their screens long enough to go to the toilet. The Bar
-
Even though schools are back in session in person, their teachers can still monitor the screens on their school-issued devices via software such as GoGuardian. In a new report from the Center for Democracy and Technology, 89% of teachers say their schools will continue to use student-monitoring
-
The 32-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act is failing to protect neurodivergent students from school monitoring and risk assessment software that treats any divergence from stereotypically "normal" behaviour as a harm to both the students themselves and others. Remote proctoring software
-
In a report, the UK's Digital Futures Commission warns that the explosion of use of education technology brings risks to children's privacy, especially that the data it collects, much of it personally identifiable, will be entered into the heavily commercial global data ecosystem, with uncertain
-
The Welsh Local Government Association is collaborating with the Centre for Digital Public Services on an 8-to-12-week discovery project to help local authorities to understand schools' requirements for information management systems and understand the market offerings in order to formulate a needs
-
Following the US Supreme Court's Dobbs decision that paved the way for states to enact legislation criminalising abortion, health advocates warn that the surveillance software schools use to algorithmically monitor students' messages and search terms could be weaponised against teens looking for
-
Workers in Amazon warehouses are tracked closely by a system that records every minute of "time off task" via the radio frequency handheld scanners workers use to track customer packages. Breaching strict time off task time limits can get an employee fired. Time off task includes bathroom breaks
-
Documents filed with the US National Labor Relations Board show that Amazon issues warehouse workers with radio-frequency handheld scanners to track and record every minute of "time off task". The filing is part of a dispute at the State Island Amazon warehouse, where workers voted to unionise in
-
JP Morgan Chase's hundreds of thousands of employees are monitored in detail throughout their working day with the collected data sent to the data management system Workforce Activity Data Utility, which the company began building shortly before the coronavirus pandemic started. Some employees say
-
A report finds that most of the education technology endorsed by 49 governments in the rush to online learning during the covid-19 pandemic puts at risk or directly violates the privacy and rights of children for purposes unrelated to their education. Such platforms track children across the
-
A former Amazon warehouse worker writes that every day was "brutal" because of the "exploitative and dangerous" standards enforced by Amazon executives. Amazon's anxiety-inducing policies about bathroom use and low pay should be seen in context with fast food and retail workers, who frequently
-
After an in-person auction in São João let Brazilian technology companies bid for a contract to supply facial recognition technology to the public school system. PontoID, which won the $162,000 contract, began secretly rolling out the technology without informing parents or students in advance. The
-
Intel, in partnership with the software company Classroom Technologies, has developed an AI facial analysis system ("Class") by training an algorithmic model based on labels psychologists applied to the emotions they could detect in videos of students in real-life classrooms. The software is
-
A student in Minneapolis was outed when their parents were contacted by school administrators when surveillance software found LGBTQ keywords in their writing on a school-supplied laptop. The risk of many more such cases is increasing as the use of edtech spread, fuelled by the pandemic, and
-
In December 2019, a Brazilian public security programme, called the Integrated Border Operations Center (CIOF) was presented. The CIOF aims to combat transnational organised crime in the region of Foz do Iguaçu and the Triple Border Area1, shared by Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguy, and integrate
-
An increasingly broad range of US government agencies - including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Social Security Administration, and the departments of Agriculture, Education, and Housing and Urban Development - are able to break into encrypted phones and copy their data using technology
-
The Nigerian startup uLesson, which began by offering pre-recorded lessons on dongles, now delivers livestreamed interactive video classes to learners in a number of African countries as well as the US and UK. One of uLesson's investors is Tencent, which also backed at least three Chinese EdTech
-
A 24-year-old man in Atlanta, Georgia is suing Amazon after being left with extensive brain and spinal cord injuries after an Amazon van crashed into his car. Amazon claims it isn't legally liable because the driver worked for the delivery company Harper Logistics LLC. However, the lawsuit seeks to
-
The Indian online educational services company Byju, which sells a live online one-on-one learning platform in the US, UK, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico, has aggressive plans to expand in the US and is seeking acquisitions there and in the UK and Australia. In 2021, it acquired the digital reading
-
A new report from the education news site The 74 Million finds that in-school digital surveillance programs are flagging LGBTQ+ content as "pornographic". For example, Gaggle, comprehensive monitoring software implemented in the Minneapolis public school system, has led administrators to notify
-
In a legal action, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain and the App Drivers and Couriers Union claim that Uber's use of facial recognition software for its Real-Time ID Check to verify the identity of drivers is discriminatory because facial recognition software is known to be less
-
Vaccinating a large portion of the population against COVID-19 is a critical step toward curbing the pandemic – within China and around the world. But setting population percentage targets without clear protections for people’s rights opens up the possibility of authorities abusing the quota to
-
A new report finds that monitoring software is in wide use in US K-12 schools, and that teachers, parents, and students generally believe the benefits outweigh the risks while still expressing some privacy and equity concerns. The authors recommend transparency, data minimisation, and mitigation of
-
AI-powered cameras made by the startup Netradyne and used in Amazon's delivery vans incorrectly penalises drivers for events beyond their control or which do not constitute unsafe driving such as if they are cut off by another vehicle. The data collected by the cameras is sent to Amazon, which uses
-
An excerpt from the new book "Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy", describes in detail the tracking systems used in Amazon warehouses to ensure workers meet their managers' targets. The system is a mix of surveillance, measurement
-
The 20 years since the 9/11 attacks have fundamentally changed the way the New York Police Department operates, leading it to use facial recognition software, licence plate readers, and mobile X-ray vans, among other surveillance tools for both detecting and blocking potential terrorist attacks and
-
Since launching its The Learning App in 2015, the Indian EdTech company Byju's had grown to serve more than 80 million users and 5.5 million paid subscribers by 2021; it provides learning programs for students aged four years old and up. However, former employees say that underpinning the company's
-
Despite having opened their borders to and taking in millions of fleeing Venezuelan migrants, the Colombian government’s handling process for this population tells a story of discrimination rather than inclusion. The 2021 issuance of the Temporary Statute for Venezuelan Migrants came with a legal
-
Following the largest protests seen on the island in decades, Cuba’s government introduced new social media regulations that make inciting acts that alter public order a crime, and ordered ISPs to shut off access for those who “spread fake news or hurt the image of the state”. Critics believe the
-
In January 2021, the Indian Health Ministry officially allowed Aadhaar-based authentication when creating a UHID for identification and authentication of beneficiaries for various health IT applications promoted by the Ministry. This enabled the Co-Win portal, which is used to book COVID-19
-
The Myanmar military are stopping people in the street, checking through the data on their phones, and taking them to jail if they find suspicious messages or photos. At least 5,100 people were still in jail many months after opposing the February 1, 2021 military takeover. The spontaneous searches
-
Teachers and staff members at state primary and upper primary schools across the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh are protesting the requirement that they use a digital attendance system to log their entry and exit times. Among the problems: the system was introduced without a trial period to solve
-
The South African government urged social media platforms to trace and remove posts that incite violence, share false information, and call for civil disobedience after a July 2021 series of spiralling protests sparked by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuka. A number of other African
-
July 2021 saw violent protests that left 72 people dead and 1,300 in prison after former president Jacob Zuma was jailed for failing to appear before a constitutional court’s inquiry into corruption during his time in office. In response, the South African government deployed the military onto the
-
The global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks finds that Cuba has restricted access to social media and messaging platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as some Telegram servers, on the govt-owned telecom provider ETECSA during the largest protests the country has seen in
-
Israel is abandoning its longstanding tactic of raiding Palestinian homes for “intelligence mapping” in favour of digitised surveillance that includes a vast and sophisticated 20-year-old network of CCTV, ANPR, and IP cameras throughout the Old City in East Jerusalem (“Mabat 2000”), automated facial
-
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has filed a lawsuit in Hamburg against three AdTech industry trade bodies including the Interactive Avertising Bureau (IAB). Members of the IAB include big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter...), data brokers (Equifax, Experian, Acxiom...)
-
Republic Squiare, one of the cultural and social hubs of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, is under constant surveillance by equipment made by the Chinese company Huawei that recognises faces, identifies vehicle number plates, and judges whether activities are "suspicious". Despite controversy over the
-
After developing software that automatically recognises cookie banners that do not comply with the GDPR (usually because they do not provide a clear one-click option to reject all non-essential cookies), noyb has sent over 500 complaints to companies they consider non-compliant and given them a one
-
Amazon delivery partner companies are ordering their drivers to turn off Amazon's Mentor monitoring app so they can take more risks in order to hit Amazon's delivery targets. Mentor, made by a company called eDriving, is a smartphone app Amazon uses to monitor drivers in Amazon-branded vans that
-
Documents acquired under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 reveal that staff and student protests against cuts at the University of Sydney were surveilled by both the university administration and police, who have been widely criticised for using excessive force at education
-
Delivery drivers in Jakarta use GPS-spoofing apps in order to improve their chances of selection by the Gojek delivery and transport app, an equivalent to Apple Pay, Postmates, Venmo, and Uber all in one. Gojek that operates in more than 200 cities in Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand
-
A surveillance plane flown by the Florida Highway Patrol circled repeatedly over a news conference in which two civil rights lawyers announced a lawsuit against local police and demanded a federal investigation into the killing of two unarmed black teenagers. Publicly available flight data confirmed
-
Protesters in Tunisia have faced hate messages, threats, and other types of harassment on social media, and been arrested when they complain to police. Arrests and prosecutions based on Facebook posts are becoming more frequent, and in street protests law enforcement appears to target LGBTQ
-
In response to an FOI request, US Customs and Border Patrol released the video collected by a Predator drone it flew for 90 minutes at a height of 6,000 feet over the Minneapolis protests following the murder of George Floyd. CBP has been repeatedly found engaging in this type of surveillance; past
-
Russian authorities are using facial recognition to track opposition protesters to their homes and arrest them, though the cameras are often turned off or "malfunctioning" when state security agents are suspected of attacks on or murders of journalists and opposition activists. The data is gathered
-
Following the coup in Myanmar, the junta deployed Chinese CH-3A and Cailhong drones to monitor protesters and aid the military, according to a report that based its findings on images posted to social media showing low-flying drones over protests in Mandalay. CH-3A drones collect aerial surveillance
-
Following the January 6 invasion of the US Capitol Building, federal law enforcement used a wide variety of surveillance technologies to track down participants, including facial recognition, licence plate readers, policy body cameras, and cellphone tracking. While many of the people being tracked
-
Police in Phoenix, Arizona called leaders of a peaceful protest in October 2020 "targets" while surveilling them with drones, cameras, and vehicles. ABC15 found that police and prosecutors collaborated to charge protesters as a "criminal street gang". Although the charges were later dropped, protest
-
The call centre company Teleperformance, which employs about 380,000 people in 34 countries providing customer service for dozens of major UK companies and government departments, has told some non-UK staff that AI-powered webcams will be installed in their homes to watch for infractions of company
-
As the long Minnesota winter came to an end in March 2021, both protesters and police began preparing for the beginning of tunneling work to build the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline. Intended to update the decaying previous structure and double its capacity. Police practiced a variety of crowd control
-
Clashes between police and lockdown protesters have spawned reports of police brutality in Greece. Mobile phone footage of one such protest in March 2021 suggested that the police are using drones to surveil the protests, and some of those remanded have complained that they’ve been beaten and
-
On March 17th, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) approved a bill allowing the digital tracking of people arriving from abroad and who would have to go into quarantine. Travellers will be tracked using digital tracking bracelets, or other means like cell phone bracelet. According to Haaretz, Deputy
-
The Belarusian government is using the "Kipod" facial recognition software developed by the local software company LLCC Synesis to track and identify dissidents. Synesis was previously sanctioned by the EU for providing authorities with an AI surveillance platform capable of tracking individuals
-
In December 2020 Myanmar authorities began rolling out its $1.2 million "Safe City" system of 335 Huawei AI-equipped surveillance cameras in eight townships in the capital, Naypyidaw. The system, whose purpose was originally presented by the Myanmar government as fighting crime, automatically scans
-
On 2 March 2021, the Ministry of Health of Uganda unveiled its plan to immunize millions against COVID-19 starting on 10 March 2021. The statement made by the Ministry of Health noted that "All persons eligible for vaccination will be required to provide a National Identification Card in the case of
-
Hundreds of pages of Myanmar government budgets for the last two fiscal years obtained by the New York Times show that the Myanmar military who staged a coup in February 2021 had new and sophisticated tools at their disposal: Israeli-made, military-grade surveillance drones, European iPhone cracking
-
Health officials in Lebanon had indicated that all residents in Lebanon there would be equal access to the Covid-19 vaccine programme, regardless of nationality. However data is indicating a higher number of Syrian and Palestinian refugees either not registering or receiving the vaccine, and so a
-
Peruvian police have used force, arbitrary arrests, undercover infiltrators, tear gas, and forced disappearance against marchers protesting the removal of president Martín Vizcarra. Three protesters have been killed, more than 60 have disappeared, and hundreds have been injured. While the
-
The internet, mobile, and social media shutdown in Myanmar left protesters vulnerable to rumours and at a disadvantage in organising opposition to the 2021 military coup. Coordination was done via phone, word of mouth, and the Bluetooth-based messaging app Bridgefy, which was downloaded more than 1
-
UK police have used unmanned drones to monitor political protests for animal rights, by Extinction Rebellion, and against HS2, an extreme-right demonstration, and those held peacefully by Black Lives Matter, according to the campaign group Drone Watch. The Surrey, Cleveland, Staffordshire
-
Amazon has begun issuing partner delivery companies with AI-enabled cameras to monitor and track drivers' behaviour on the road. The cameras add another layer of monitoring to existing requirements to run the smartphone app Mentor; drivers complain that the app's bugs lead to unfair disciplinary
-
The 2020 Belarus protests were the largest in the country's history and brought an unprecedented crackdown, in which protesters nationwide were tortured and criminally prosecuted as a means of repressing peaceful assembly. A report finds that these cases became political as the government violated
-
The government has revealed that illegal immigrants will also benefit from the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine. National Treasury director-general Dondo Mogajane said this during a virtual meeting between his department and the SA National Editors Forum on Wednesday afternoon. “We are in SA and we
-
New data emerged in January 2021 to show that the National Guard deployment of more than 43,350 troops during the nationwide demonstrations following the killing of George Floyd was far more extensive than had been realised, and far greater than the 6,200 troops deployed at the Capitol during the
-
An immigration detention centre has been temporarily closed after several members of staff tested positive for coronavirus. The Home Office said Brook House, near Gatwick airport in West Sussex, has been shut for 10 days. It said a “very small number” of detainees had been moved to Colnbrook
-
Undocumented immigrants in Nebraska will not be eligible to receive COVID-19 vaccines, Governor Pete Ricketts announced Monday. Ricketts, the son of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, was asked at a press conference if undocumented persons would be included when vaccines become available to
-
The Home Office is pushing ahead with charter flights despite the UK’s new lockdown and soaring levels of coronavirus, in what campaigners say shows “contempt” for both deportees and the wider public. Boris Johnson announced new, stricter coronavirus measures on Monday in an effort to slow the
-
Over 2020, EFF supported the right to protest without being surveilled by bringing lawsuits, offering protesters legal support, teaching protesters surveillance self-defence, and providing tools for people on the ground to use to determine what equipment their local police departments are using to
-
A Sudanese man who had been seeking asylum in Ireland was deported to London just days before the UK capital went into the highest levels of COVID-related restrictions. The man, who is in his twenties, was deported last Thursday despite Irish government assurances to halt such removals during the
-
Public documents show that US school districts have for years been buying phone cracking tools from companies like Cellebrite and Oxygen Forensics. The equipment enables school district employees to search students’ personal devices. In one example, the Los Angeles Unified School District says its
-
French data protection regulator CNIL fined Google and Amazon €100 million and €35 million respectively for breaches of the French Data Protection Act. The CNIL found that the French websites of Google and Amazon had not sought the prior consent of visitors before advertising cookies were saved on
-
Civil society organisations Civil Liberties union for Europe, Open Rights Group and Panoptykon Foundation have filed complaints against Google and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) member companies in Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Romania. The complaints address privacy abuses
-
Canada has a reputation, both at home and around the world, as a beacon of tolerance when it comes to acceptance of immigrants and refugees. Part of this is due to the favourable attitudes of Canadians on the issue. Over the decade, the balance of opinion in Canada has become increasingly positive
-
At least one immigration removal centre has already seen an outbreak of coronavirus, while detainees are left in limbo. People who were released from detention centres at the start of the pandemic are being quietly locked up again despite the health risks and uncertainty caused by the second wave
-
On November 9, 2020, after a year of escalating tensions, Peruvian president Martín Vizcarra was impeached on the grounds of "moral incapacity" by lawmakers threatened by his anti-corruption investigations and the policy reform he led. The street protests that followed all over the country were
-
The world is set to hit a record low for resettling refugees this year, the UNHCR, the refugee branch of the United Nations, has warned. Figures show only 15,425 refugees had been resettled by the end of September, compared to 63,726 for the whole of 2019. In 2016 the number was eight times higher
-
Asylum seekers and trafficking victims are being forced to travel miles on public transport despite lockdown restrictions because the Home Office has said they must continue to report to officials in person. People who are awaiting a decision on their application to remain in the UK – including
-
The Home Office did not discuss the decision to restart asylum evictions with local authorities, it has been revealed, despite concerns about the immediate impact on homelessness and heightened risks of coronavirus transmission. Councils were not briefed about the change in policy before it was
-
While traditional media sought to criminalize the widespread November 2020 protests in Peru following the Congressional ouster of President Vizcarra, witnesses disseminated videos and photographs of police abuse on social networks. In the fear and uncertainty, many myths also circulated. In Peru
-
[UK] Refugees and asylum seekers are wrongly sent NHS charges for 'tens of thousands' for healthcare
NHS hospitals are wrongly sending bills for as much as “tens of thousands of pounds” to asylum seekers and refugees in Bristol - and refusing some care upfront, it is claimed. Asylum seekers and refugees are entitled to free healthcare in the UK. But there are numerous anecdotes of vulnerable -
On Election Day, there were some reports of Facebook users not seeing the "Why am I seeing this ad" information tab on political ads appearing on their newsfeeds. Affected users were shown an error message stating "You can't use this feature right now. We limit how often you can post, comment or do
-
Following the Trump re-election campaign's "block" purchase of Youtube homepage ad space - known as its masthead - in early 2020, Youtube has announced that it will be “retiring” reservations for full-day advertisements on its coveted homepage ad spot beginning in 2021, a change it said it
-
Less than a week before the election, the Democratic Party reported that Facebook's social media advertising systems had prevented the campaign from running some ads, allegedly resulting in the loss of more than $500,000 in potential campaign donations. According to Facebook, the flaws resulted from
-
After a two year investigation into credit referencing agencies (CRAs) Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - initiated in part pursuant to a complaint filed by PI against Equifax and Experian in November 2018 - the ICO has published a report finding "widespread and systemic data protection failings" in
-
Despite being a subscription service that doesn't depend on advertising revenue, Slack (owned by Salesforce) collects a large amount of data on the people who use its system, including details provided voluntarily at sign-up, when and how people use the platform, and information about third-party
-
Hundreds of wet and cold migrants were forced to spend hours in cramped containers on a “rubble-strewn building site” after arriving in the UK on small boats, a report has revealed. In a rare insight into how newly arrived asylum seekers are treated by authorities, prison inspectors visited Tug
-
Foreign rough sleepers face being deported from Britain under draconian immigration laws to be introduced when the Brexit transition period ends. Under the immigration rules to be laid before parliament and due to come into force on 1 January, rough sleeping will become grounds for refusal of, or
-
noyb filed a complaint against address broker AZ Direct Österreich GmbH after it refused to provide information on the origin and recipients of data processed. The address broker, in a response to a data subject access request, claimed not to know where the residential address of the data subject –
-
A gap in government guidance means that thousands of legal migrant key workers could be forced to choose between following new public health laws and destitution, according to Labour MPs and charities. They are warning that no recourse to public funds (NRPF) conditions, which apply to roughly 1.4
-
Despite its indications of support for the pro-democracy protesters, in October 2020 the EU bought the Belarusian authorities 15 surveillance drones, raising concerns that the video equipment they carry would be used to identify and arrest individual pro-democracy protesters. The EU foreign service
-
In October UK health officials discovered that limitations on the number of rows on an older version of Microsoft’s spreadsheet software Excel led the system to miss 16,000 positive coronavirus tests and fail to alert an estimated 50,000 people who had been in close contact with them that they
-
In the spring of 2020 the Trump administration pushed FEMA to award more than $760 million in contracts, bypassing the usual bidding process. The largest of these was a White House-ordered March $96 million no-bid contract to AirBoss of America for 100,000 powered respirators and filters for medical
-
The Home Office moved dozens of asylum seekers involved in a Covid outbreak more than 120 miles despite an enforcement order saying they should remain in self-isolation for 14 days, the Guardian has learned. Home Office contractors have been accused of being “beyond reckless” in their handling of
-
Students arriving for the fall semester at the University of Arizona were required on arrival to take a rapid COVID-19 test. Those testing negative could proceed to move into their dorms and begin campus life; those testing positive were required to spend ten days in a special isolation dorm and
-
Migrants seeking asylum in Britain could be processed offshore under plans being developed by Priti Patel. Officials have ruled out Ascension Island and St Helena as impractical because of their distance from the UK but the Home Secretary is still seeking a third country where asylum seekers could
-
The UK Department of Health has hired the credit-checking company TransUnion to verify the names and addresses of people requesting home coronavirus tests, placing millions at risk of being barred from access to these tests. The government says the purpose is to prevent abuse of the public testing
-
The US company Hubstaff, which provides monitoring software to employers, says its UK customer base quadrupled between February and October 2020. The software tracks workers’ hours, keystrokes, mouse movements, and website visits. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development warns that
-
As working from home expands, employers are ramping up surveillance using the features built into software such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, which report when employees are active, or requiring employees to attend early-morning video conferences with webcams switched on. In early 2020, PwC
-
Thousands of asylum seekers currently accommodated in hotels are facing removal from the UK, the Home Office has announced. A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Independent, states that evictions of refused asylum seekers will take place “with immediate effect” and charities have reported an
-
In mid-September, “human error” led Public Health Wales to post the personal data of all 18,000-odd Welsh residents who tested positive for COVID-19 between the end of February and the end of August to a public server, where for about 20 hours it was readily searchable by any visitor to the site
-
Around 8,800 children have been deported from the United States along the Mexican border thanks to a new pandemic-related measure that functionally stripped the rights of those seeking asylum. Donald Trump’s administration has expelled nearly 160,000 people since the emergency order proclaimed by
-
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it would end screening of inbound international passengers from a group of countries including the UK, Brazil, Iran, Ireland, and the EU Schengen countries in the third week of September. CDC said it would replace the programme with new,
-
The Citizen app, which was designed to allow users to see unverified reports of crime in their neighbourhoods, is partnering with Los Angeles County for its contact tracing app, SafePass, which uses Bluetooth and GPS to track interactions with other people. Citizen has been criticised in the past
-
Numerous US colleges are forcing students to download location-tracking apps or wear symptom-tracking devices, many of them similar to tracking systems student athletes are often required to install on their phones. Tracking athletes did little to help them gain either an education or a professional
-
A 12-year-old boy and his parent worked out how to game the grading algorithm used by the testing software Edgenuity by including a list of keywords alongisde two full sentences in responses to short-answer questions. Students at others of the more than 20,000 schools that use Edgenuity use this and
-
After discovering that the online platform for virtual learning Edgenuity uses an algorithm to grade tests comprising short-answer question, students and their parents have learned to game the system by writing extra sentences and adding a list of keywords that the algorithm is likely to be scanning
-
Cambridge Assessment, which operates one of the UK’s three big examination boards that administer most GCSE and A-level qualifications, says it approached ministers and the Department of Education two weeks before the publication of both sets of exam results to warn there were major problems in the
-
Human rights experts have accused the home secretary, Priti Patel, of ignoring legal guidance in an attempt to target child asylum seekers who cannot prove they are under 18. A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Observer, reveals that the government is putting pressure on social workers to
-
Standard PCR tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people in the US who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of virus, and may not be contagious. Rather than skipping testing people without symptoms, as the US CDC has suggested, the solution may be to use less sensitive, though less
-
Florida law graduates are reporting that they have encountered significant data breaches, including attempted hacks on bank accounts, as a result of using software from Missouri-based ILG Technologies that they were required to download in order to take the bar exam virtually, a necessity because of
-
Revenues accruing to the touchless payment company Zwipe more than doubled in the first half of 2020, partly due to reduced operating expenses, and partly due to the pandemic-fueled rise of secure contactless payment technologies. https://findbiometrics.com/covid-19-game-changer-biometric-payment
-
The English regulator, the Care Quality Commission, and its Scottish equivalent, the Care Inspectorate, refused to disclose, in response to FOI requests, the COVID-19 death tolls in individual care homes in part to protect providers’ commercial interest and avoid undermining the UK’s care system
-
While countries like New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea publish detailed near-real-time data on local coronavirus outbreaks, the US offers very few details on how the disease is spreading due to political meddling, privacy concerns, and long-time neglect of public health surveillance systems
-
The California bill AB2004 would direct the state to set up a blockchain-based system for immunity passports that would empower the California Department of Consumer Affairs to authorise health care providers to issue verifiable health credentials that could be used to grant or deny access to public
-
As a condition of returning campus, all 1,500 students at Michigan’s Albion College were required to download and install a contact tracing app called Aura, which was developed by Pennsylvania-based Nucleus Careers and tracks students’ real time locations 24/7 with no opt-out. collects and stores
-
In May 2020, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care hired McKinsey to help define the “vision, purpose, and narrative” of a permanent organisation to manage test and trace programmes. The new National Institute for Health Protection will be led by Baroness Dido Harding. McKinsey was paid £563
-
All migrants arriving in the UK since June have been ordered to quarantine, but a Border Force source said that little is being done to ensure the rules are followed and some in emergency accommodation are being given vouchers to go to the shops. Thousands of British tourists returning from France
-
Hundreds of emails and documents obtained in response to a freedom of information request by BuzzFeed News show that US federal agents monitored social media for information on planned Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Minneapolis, Washington DC, Los Angeles, and other cities. Researchers and
-
In August 2020, controversial Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko cut off most of the nation's access to the internet in hopes of disrupting the protests against the vote-rigging that saw him installed as president. Online news sites were left largely offline from election day onward, and
-
Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a
-
Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a
-
The UK Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government hired the AI firm Faculty, which had previously been contracted by prime ministerial special advisor Dominic Cummings to work for the Vote Leave campaign and which lists two current and former Conservative ministers among its shareholders
-
Following trials in Leicester, Luton, and Blackburn with Darwen, the UK government will assign teams of health care professionals to more than ten local authorities and offer them Public Health England’s near real-time data on infections and a dedicated team of contact tracers, shifting away from
-
In early August, when the UK government announced it was purchasing 90-minute saliva-based COVID-19 tests called LamPORE and 5,000 lab-free machines to process them, supplied by DNANudge, clinical researchers were dismayed to find that there is no publicly available data about the accuracy or
-
In early August, when the UK government announced it was purchasing 90-minute saliva-based COVID-19 tests called LamPORE and 5,000 lab-free machines to process them, supplied by DNANudge, clinical researchers were dismayed to find that there is no publicly available data about the accuracy or
-
The French data protection authority, CNIL, has examined the French contact tracing app and ruled that it is not fully compliant with the provisions of GDPR and the French data protection law. CNIL’s primary complaint was that the app transferred the news that a user had been infected to all their
-
Professional sports teams are considering adopting facial recognition admissions systems to make stadiums as touchless for fans as possible as part of efforts to provide a safe environment during the pandemic. Both the Los Angeles Football Club and the New York Mets are trying the Clear app, made by
-
Professional sports teams are considering adopting facial recognition admissions systems to make stadiums as touchless for fans as possible as part of efforts to provide a safe environment during the pandemic. Both the Los Angeles Football Club and the New York Mets are trying the Clear app, made by
-
As part of efforts to make returning to campus safer, US universities are considering or implementing mandates requiring students to install exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and other unproven new technologies, risking exacerbating existing inequalities in access to both
-
As part of efforts to make returning to campus safer, US universities are considering or implementing mandates requiring students to install exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and other unproven new technologies, risking exacerbating existing inequalities in access to both
-
Questions have been raised about an irregular process by which the Trump administration awarded a $10.2 million dollar six-month contract to Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies. TeleTracking has traditionally sold software to help hospitals track patient status; under the new contract it is
-
Individuals accept giving more information in emergencies, and the tradeoffs between providing emergency help and privacy must be carefully considered. A study of popular disaster apps finds that many apps ignore privacy policies and government agency policies. Twelve of the 14 apps studied capture
-
Questions have been raised about an irregular process by which the Trump administration awarded a $10.2 million dollar six-month contract to Pittsburgh-based TeleTracking Technologies. TeleTracking has traditionally sold software to help hospitals track patient status; under the new contract it is
-
A growing number of companies - for example, San Mateo start-up Camio and AI startup Actuate, which uses machine learning to identify objects and events in surveillance footage - are repositioning themselves as providers of AI software that can track workplace compliance with covid safety rules such
-
A growing number of companies - for example, San Mateo start-up Camio and AI startup Actuate, which uses machine learning to identify objects and events in surveillance footage - are repositioning themselves as providers of AI software that can track workplace compliance with covid safety rules such
-
According to records obtained under a freedom of information request, the San Francisco Police Department used the camera network belonging to downtown Union Square Improvement District to spy on protesters during the end of May and early June 2020. The high-definition cameras, manufactured by
-
A preliminary study finds that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people wearing masks. The study tested 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms, and the best had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching unmasked photos with photos of the same person wearing a digitally-applied
-
A preliminary study finds that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people wearing masks. The study tested 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms, and the best had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching unmasked photos with photos of the same person wearing a digitally-applied
-
Both protesters and police during the 2019 Hong Kong protests used technical tools including facial recognition to counter each other's tactics. Police tracked protest leaders online and sought to gain access to their phones on a set of Telegram channels. When police stopped wearing identification
-
By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%
-
Analysis of untreated wastewater from the county health department in Yosemite Valley led Biobot Analytics, based in Cambridge, MA, to estimate that 170 people in Yosemite national park during the July 4 weekend may have been infected with the coronavirus, dropping to 60 during the following week
-
By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%
-
It is said, better late than never. Some activists and academics, hesitantly, thought the old maxim could be applied to the Centre's micro-credit facility for street vendors – which was indisputably behindhand, in the wake of the coronavirus-triggered lockdown, announced on March 24. But, more than
-
The algorithm and mathematical model used to predict students’ grades by the International Baccalaureate programme, which was forced to cancel exams because of the pandemic, incorporated three elements: coursework, teachers’ predictions of their students’ exam grades, and “school context”, which was
-
The algorithm and mathematical model used to predict students’ grades by the International Baccalaureate programme, which was forced to cancel exams because of the pandemic, incorporated three elements: coursework, teachers’ predictions of their students’ exam grades, and “school context”, which was
-
More than 725,000 people downloaded Ireland’s COVID-19 tracker and contact tracing app, Covid Green, within 24 hours of its launch, according to the Health and Safety Executive. Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly stressed that the app, which was developed by the Waterford company Nearform, was not
-
In early July the Open Rights Group issued a pre-action legal letter to UK health secretary Matt Hancock and the Department of Health and Social Care saying they have breached requirements under the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR by failing to conduct an impact assessment for the Test and Trace
-
Under a new $10 million-plus contract, in July the US Department of Health and Human Services began sending hospital statistics such as bed availability, patient numbers, and ventilators to the Pittsburgh company TeleTracking Technologies for analysis with no guarantee the information would be made
-
Several of the Chinese companies producing personal protective equipment such as face masks were shown via undercover video footage to be using Uighur labour under a government labour transfer programme that pays regional subsidies for each worker taken in. The equipment is being shipped all over
-
Several people have been arrested in Bangladesh for issuing bogus documentation to people who have not been tested for the coronavirus showing they are not infected. Such documents are required for migrant workers, who need to show that they are virus-free when they arrive at their overseas
-
US epidemiologists are complaining that secrecy is interfering with public health efforts to curb the coronavirus. Beginning in April, California state and county health authorities have refused requests from scientists from Stanford University and several University of California campuses for
-
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement service announced in July that the State Department will not issue visas to students whose universities shift to online-only learning and they must leave the country or face deportation. More than 1 million higher education students in the US come from
-
Human Rights Watch reports that drug cartels and rebel groups are imposing their own lockdowns in rural areas of Colombia and using WhatsApp chats and pamphlets to advise local residents of curfew hours, transport shutdowns, and other bans that are far more strict than those imposed by the
-
In advice issued to corporates, Deloitte considers the options for protecting workforces and suggests that immunity tests are available as a tool in any of three possible scenarios: the government ordered testing; the company adopts testing as a strategic initiative; employees take private action
-
Egyptian doctors are reporting that they are being threatened for speaking and posting publicly about working conditions as they struggle in a medical system overwhelmed by the coronavirus. At least seven members of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, a quasi-governmental body that represents health
-
Soon after the UK began reopening pubs with the requirement that staff retain customer details in case they are needed later for contact tracing, a woman reported on Twitter that the next day the bartender messaged her on Facebook. The story was picked up by Refinery29 and the Independent, but taken
-
Hundreds of trucks carrying goods and humanitarian aid from Cameroon’s Douala sea port to Central African Republic are stranded at the border because testing kits are in short supply; under an agreement, Cameroon drivers who test negative are supposed to be granted access. Results of tests completed
-
Public-private partnership launches biometrics identity and vaccination record system in West Africa
In July 2020 a public-private partnership programme between the Bill Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance, Mastercard, and the AI identity authentication company Trust Stamp was ready to introduce a biometric identity platform in low-income remote communities in West Africa. The programme will -
By late June, two months after its launch, Australia’s A$1.5 million CovidSafe app had failed to help authorities identify even a single contact of a confirmed case. In the states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania the app had not picked up any contacts that had not already
-
Britain’s Cabinet Office awarded an £840,000 contract for researching public opinion about government policies, portions of which involved conducting focus groups related to Brexit rather than COVID-19, to Public First, a company owned by two long-term associates of Minister for the Cabinet Office
-
In order to reopen borders and restart travel and trade, the East African Community is working with Switzerland-based The Commons Project, a public trust that builds digital services for public good in order to develop an app called CommonPass. The app, which will be designed in a July sprint, will
-
Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court has struck down a government order forcing telecommunications companies to provide access to the user information relating to the country’s 200 million citizens to enable the government to conduct phone interviews to determine the economic response to the COVID-19
-
Despite having promised in 2016 not to facilitate domestic surveillance, the AI startup Dataminr used its firehose access to Twitter to alert law enforcement to social media posts with the latest whereabouts and actions of demonstrators involved in the protests following the killing of George Floyd
-
Governments in Norway, Britain, Qatar, and India, among others, have had to either drop or remediate the contact tracing apps they’ve released to help combat the coronavirus due to the rush in which they were released. Many had security flaws that risked exposing user data; others pose privacy and
-
Israel’s initial success in curbing the spread of the coronavirus in April was followed in June by a surge in cases that government advisers blamed on insufficient resources for ministries to implement an effective trace-and-trace programme and increase testing to the level that would show clearly
-
In London, during the UK’s coronavirus lockdown, young black men were stopped and searched by police 21,950 times with no further action taken in 80% of cases. If each individual were searched only once - which may not be the case - that would equate to 30% of all young black males in London. The
-
The UK had unrealistic expectations for antibody testing; as early as April health secretary Matt Hancock was suggesting that antibody testing could form the basis for immunity passports even though it is still uncertain whether and for how long SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to further infection
-
The Finnish government will not move forward with its plan to oblige unsuccessful asylum seekers to wear ankle monitors, Maria Ohisalo, the Minister of the Interior, stated on Tuesday. “It’s something that’d be difficult to carry out as it’s considered in the government programme,” she said. “The
-
The New Zealand MP Hamish Walker, a member of the centre-right opposition National party, admitted leaking the details of all the country’s 18 active COVID-19 cases to the media in order to “expose the government’s shortcoming”. Walker said he had been advised that his actions were not illegal. The
-
Domestic abuse campaigners and victims have accused the government of not valuing the lives of migrant women in forthcoming legislation on the issue.They are urging the government to make “life-saving” changes to the domestic abuse bill, which will be debated for its final stage in parliament on
-
Greece has extended a coronavirus lockdown on its migrant camps for the fifth time. The move has prompted accusations that the government is using the pandemic to limit the migrants' movement. The Greek Migration Ministry announced on Saturday that the country's migrant camps would remain under
-
New US federal data released by the CDC in response to freedom of information requests show striking racial and ethnic disparities in all parts of the country in who gets infected and hospitalised with coronavirus. A survey of 640,000 infections in nearly 1,000 US counties found that Latino and
-
The Santiago Court of Appeals has ruled that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs cannot require migrants to sign a declaration saying they agree to not return to Chile for nine years. The government is now going forward with an appeal stating that this ruling contraditcs a 2018 resolution, says the
-
The Dutch data protection authority, Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, is recommending against a bill working its way through the parliament that would force telecoms operators to collect more data on their customers and share it with Statistics Netherlands as part of the country’s pandemic response. The
-
A British freedom of information tribunal ruled that for national security reasons police in England and Wales may refuse to say whether they are using Stingrays, also known as IMSI-catchers, which are capable of tracking thousands of mobile phones and intercepting their calls, text messages, and
-
Sidestepping the need to obtain a search warrant, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been accessing smartphone location data by buying it from private marketing that typically embed tracker in apps. This data, which maps the movement of millions of cellphones in America, was collected
-
Even before anything like an official immunity passport has become available, users of online dating sites are finding that some prospective dates are pushing for in-person meetups by claiming that either they’ve tested negative for the coronavirus or have positive antibody tests showing that they
-
A vulnerability in the Bono Familiar Universal, the platform used to distribute the financial subsidy provided to households in precarious economic situation by the Peruvian government in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, enabled the subsidy to be accessed by malicious individuals. The
-
Knowledge Ecology International has received copies of a number of contracts it requested under the US Freedom of Information Act that were signed in 2020 by the US Department of Defense or the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to cover research on COVID-19 vaccines or
-
A group of Democratic US Senators and Congressional Representatives have written to Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar asking for more transparency around the HHS Protect Now programme, which collects vast amounts of data, including coronavirus test results, from the CDC and state and
-
After ORG asked questions via its legal representative, AWO’s Ravi Naik, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care agreed to change the period it would retain Test and Trace data from 20 years to eight. Public Health England manager Yvonne Doyle explained that the novelty of COVID-19 was the
-
On June 24, Israeli ministers reversed a previous decision and unanimously decided to support controversial legislation allowing the Israeli security service Shin Bet to track civilians’ phones to help curb the spread of the coronavirus after a new spike in infections. On June 30 the Knesset Foreign
-
The findings of Freedom from Torture’s report, based on reviews of transcripts of asylum interviews carried out by the Home Office in 2017 or 2018 and a series of focus groups and interviews involving 25 torture survivors who had attended asylum interviews, shows they were often prevented from
-
Up to 30 charities and organisations have written to home secretary Priti Patel calling for a number of amendments on Tuesday - a year exactly until the scheme ends. Under current arrangements, EU citizens have been told to apply by June if they wish to continue living and working in Britain.The
-
The Israeli company Kando is monitoring coronavirus traces in the sewers of the city of Ashkelon via sensors, autosamplers, and controllers placed under manholes in an attempt to build an early warning system of clusters of COVID-19. The system was originally developed to spot industrial waste
-
The Israeli digital ID card creator Pangea EVP has developed an immunity passport intended to give individuals access to public spaces, including airports. The passport will include a photo of the holder, a digital signature, a hologram, and a chip. When they want to fly, holders will insert flight
-
The pandemic has exacerbated the effects of the “hostile environment” on the UK’s undocumented migrants, many of whom have lost income, are working in unsafe and exploitative conditions, are scared to seek help even though the government has promised there will be no charging or immigration checks
-
The UK Government outsourced some of the testing centre work to Deloitte. The contract states that Deloit does not have to share data of positive cases with the UK health authority Public Health England nor to local government authorities. This prevented data sharing that was arguably essential to
-
The UK government refused to abolish a coronavirus law even though it was used unlawfully in every one of the more than 50 cases that were prosecuted under it. Among those wrongly prosecuted were a woman who was fined £660 for a crime she hadn’t committed. Schedule 21 of the Coronavirus Act gives
-
After predicting that the incoming COVID-19 caseload would exceed an “unsustainable surge capacity” of ICU beds by July 6, for several days in late June Texas Medical Center hospitals stopped updating key metrics. The gap followed complaints by Texas governor Greg Abbott about negative headlines
-
More than 2,500 foreign Muslims from 35 countries travelled to India to attend a mid-March gathering held with government permission at the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters in Delhi in mid-March. A day later the government issued a notice limiting events in Delhi to 50 people and a week later grounded
-
After analysing spending by 30 million US Chase credit and debit cardholders in conjunction with coronavirus case data from Johns Hopkins University, JP Morgan found that the level of card-present spending in restaurants can predict where the virus will spread a few weeks later. The study also found
-
PI filed a complaint against health website Doctissimo with the French data protection authority (CNIL) after our research found that Doctissimo engaged in programmatic advertising, and shared the results of online depression tests taken on its platform with third parties. The complaint argues
-
Germany’s “Corona-Warn” contact tracing app amassed 6.5 million users (7.8% of the German population) in the first 24 hours after its June 16 launch despite setbacks that included disputes over data privacy and functionality. The app was developed in six weeks by a team of developers and engineers
-
TrustNet Pakistan, the country’s only digital trust foundation, has begun work alongside many other global technology companies on a digital vaccination verification platform called CovidCreds. The initiative supports projects that use privacy-preserving verifiable credentials. TrustNet is working
-
Germany’s contact tracing system is thought to have been critical in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak, especially given superspreader events such as infections in meat packing plants. Each of Germany’s 16 federal states is responsible for health, and together with the national Robert Koch Institute
-
A study of 17 Android mobile contact tracing apps from 17 different countries found that most government-sponsored contact tracing apps are insecure and risk exposing users’ privacy and data. The researchers used the presence or absence of six basic hardening techniques: name obfuscation (just one
-
Between June 25 and July 6 India said officials would visit every household in New Delhi’s entire population of 29 million to record each resident’s health details and administer a COVID-19 test. In the meantime, police, along with surveillance cameras and drone monitoring, will enforce physical
-
The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network finds that the number of Serbians newly infected by the coronavirus in the week leading up to the June 21 parliamentary election was several times higher than the officially announced figure, and suggests that the numbers were concealed so that as many
-
The UK government has instructed bars, restaurants, hairdressers, and churches to record visitors’ contact details when they begin to reopen on July 4 so they can be contacted later if necessary for contact tracing and testing. However, the industry was given no guidance on how to take care of the
-
Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the only medical institution in the state dedicated to women’s health, operated a secret policy of separating First Nation mothers, whom they identified either by appearance or by residence in a particular zip code, from their newborn babies as a
-
The October 2019 Presidential Decree 98/2019 granted the Hellenic Police the option of using drones in policing and border management for broad purposes; previously they were limited to using them for purposes such as preventing forest fires or helping rescue people after a natural disaster or an
-
In a planned study, NIST will apply synthetic masks to faces digitally in order to leverage its large datasets (18 million images of 8 million people) in order to test how well verification algorithms handle masks. The study will reopen on June 24, 2020. https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/face
-
The UN’s Economic Commission for Africa has launched the Africa Communication and Information Platform for Health and Economic Action thta will use AI and big data to provide two-way communication between citizens and health authorities. It will launch in 36 countries, with more to come as others
-
In June, a health law researcher at the University of Indonesia suggested that the government could create its own version of the international vaccination certificate issued by the WHO for those who were vaccinated against the coronavirus, when a vaccine becomes available. Comparing it to
-
Los Angeles Airport (LAX) has begun the first of two six-week voluntary trials in which travellers walk past fever-detecting cameras before reaching security. Those who show a temperature above 100.4F will be taken aside for secondary screening. During the pilot no one will be stopped from
-
By the end of its first three weeks of availability, the French contact tracing app, “StopCovid”, had seen 1.9 million downloads. Of these, only 68 people had entered a positive COVID-19 test result, and only 14 were notified that they might have been exposed, according to the French junior minister
-
The work and pensions committee has said that the immigration rules that have left 1 million migrant workers in the UK at risk of destitution because they cannot claim universal credit should be suspended. The “no recourse to public funds rule” has left many foreign nationals facing a choice of stay
-
Immigration rules that have left 1 million migrant workers in the UK at risk of destitution because they cannot claim universal credit should be suspended on public health grounds during the pandemic, a cross-party group of MPs has recommended. The work and pensions select committee said the no
-
Although the Home Office does not record ethnicity data for detainees, analysis of nationalities of those recently held within the immigration detention estate found that citizens from countries with predominantly black and brown populations are held for substantially longer periods than those from
-
New York City’s contact tracing system got off to a shaky start; in its first two weeks only 35% of the 5,347 residents who tested or were presumed positive for the coronavirus gave information about close contacts to tracers, rising slightly to 42% in the third week. Encouragingly, however, almost
-
Testing for All is helping small employers and individuals access antibody tests by making them available at £42 each out of fear that “testing inequality” could fuel greater financial inequality, as private schools and big businesses have introduced testing to allow pupils and employees to return
-
Corruption scandals have added to Latin America’s challenges in dealing with the coronavirus. In Ecuador, prosecutors identified a criminal ring that colluded with health officials to sell body bags to hospitals at 13 times the normal price, and many others are accused of price-gouging for other
-
Beginning in March 2020, Turkish authorities targeted doctors in senior positions in “medical chambers” professional bodies in Van, Mardin, and Sanhurfa for allegedly “issuing threats to create fear and panic among the public” in media interviews and social media postings in which they discussed the
-
US Customs and Border Protection Data show that the Department of Homeland Security deployed helicopters, airplanes, and drones over 15 cities, including New York City, Buffalo, Dayton OH, and Philadelphia, where demonstrators assembled to protest the killing of George Floyd and collected at least
-
A new requirement to wear wear masks in public in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus poses a problem in France and Belgium, where laws prohibit wearing face coverings, with health as the only allowed exception. In France, where the law was passed in 2010, between 2011 and 2017 1,830 Muslim
-
France has been testing AI tools with security cameras supplied by the French technology company Datakalab in the Paris Metro system and buses in Cannes to detect the percentage of passengers who are wearing face masks. The system does not store or disseminate images and is intended to help
-
Based on a recommendation by union home minister Amit Shah, in mid-June the Delhi government directed hospitals to issue covid-free certificates to patients when discharging them on the basis that they would help reduce the stigma around the disease and allow those who have recovered to go back to
-
In the second week of operation of the UK’s contact tracing system a quarter of people who tested positive for COVID-19 could not be reached because they had not supplied phone numbers or email addresses. Of the close contacts whose details were provided, contact tracers reached 90.6% to advise them
-
In a policy briefing, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics concludes that there is too much scientific uncertainty and too many ethical issues for to support immunity certification as a way of easing restrictions on travel, work, and other activities. While testing can be useful, the negative impacts
-
After some employers were caught asking for such information, in mid-June 2020 the Spanish data protection authority warned that it is a violation of data protection laws to screen job candidates based on whether they have had and recovered from COVID-19 and developed antibodies. This type of
-
By the end of March 2021 Eurostar will roll out a facial verification system in which passengers will send a scan of their passport and a selfie so that when boarding they can prove their identity by walking through a camera-lined “biometric” corridor instead of presenting their documents. The
-
UK police were almost seven times more likely to issue fines to black, Asian, and minority ethnic people than white feel for lockdown infractions. The exact figures varied around the UK; in Cumbria, which is mostly white and where people from a BAME background are more likely to be visitors, it was
-
Thousands of Muscovites ordered to download a hastily-developed app to enforce their quarantine report that they have been wrongly geolocated and fined and that the app has trapped them into compliance criteria that are impossible to meet. The app, which demands an exceptionally broad range of
-
Chinese police are using equipment from the US company Thermo-Fisher to collect blood samples from 35 million to 70 million men and boys to build a genetic map of the country's 700 million males to add to its existing database of 80 million genetic profiles. The database would allow the authorities
-
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, United Airlines has disclosed that it has agreed to transfer the ownership of its frequent flyer program and associated data to a subsidiary company and pledge the data as collateral to secure a $5 billion loan from a consortium of US banks
-
South America has become the scene of one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent times. The crisis involving migrants and refugees from Venezuela involves children, adolescents, and young people who have left their country of origin to settle in surrounding countries, either due to political or
-
The Israeli smart digital ID card and border control software company Pangea hopes its new biometric smart card could help airports reopen. The company claims governments, many of which are working on defining the medical tests and processes required for eligibility, can use the card to verify that
-
The US National Basketball Association’s plan to restart its season includes isolating players and other personnel at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida with a plan for frequent testing, quarantine protocols, and bracelets that beep if people come within six feet for too long. In addition, the
-
Seventeen of 93 UK prosecutions for breaches of emergency coronavirus laws in May were incorrect or for offences that did not exist. All but one of the 17 were stopped at the first court appearance. In total, nine prosecutions were brought under the Coronavirus Act; all were dismissed because there
-
Nepal will deport five foreign tourists and ban them from re-entering the country for two years after they joined protests demanding better quarantine facilities, more testing, and transparency in procuring medical supplies. Four tourists - three from China and one from the US - were arrested and
-
On June 15 by presidential decree Chile extended its state of catastrophe, in place since mid-March, by 90 days and the pace of new infections continued to increase and the authorities declared a full lockdown in Santiago, where quarantine is routinely enforced by soldiers. The government intends to
-
US state and local authorities are using data from a host of location tracking companies, some of them little-known, such as X-Mode Social, Foursquare Labs, Cuebiq, Unacast, Phunware, and SafeGraph, to help them decide how and when to reopen. Many of these companies are part of the adtech industry
-
After the data protection authority ruled that Norway’s Smittestopp app disproportionately intruded on users’ privacy by collecting location data without demonstrating it was strictly necessary and by failing to allow users to separately grant permission for contact tracing and for using the data
-
The UK government spent two months touting its contact tracing app as the prospective basis for returning to something close to normality. As the June 1 target date approached, however, the government increasingly downplayed its importance. In the meantime, Apple and Google’s API were adopted by
-
A large-scale preprint study of more than 100 million rides between 2018 and 2019 in Chicago, where a 2020 law requires ride-hailing apps to disclose fares, finds that the dynamic pricing algorithms used by ride-hailing companies such as Lyft, Uber, and Via are socially biased. The finding is in
-
The officials managing Florida’s 100-plus coronavirus test sites have asked the 1.3 million people tested so far for for names, social security numbers, dates of birth, and insurance information. Nearly 1,000 private labs process these tests, and dozens of contractor organisations collect swabs and
-
A detailed analysis of Pakistan’s app, which was developed by the Ministry of IT and Telecom and the National Information Technology Board and which offers dashboards for each province and state, self-assessment tools, and popup hygiene reminders, finds a number of security issues. Among them: the
-
Nearly six months after the emergence of the coronavirus, only 7.1% of research on COVID-19 references AI compared to 12% of research on other topics. AI is being used to make predictive analyses of patient data, especially medical scans, and analyse social media data, predict the spread of the
-
Human rights activists and Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to top law enforcement officials in the Trump administration to demand they cease surveilling Americans engaging in peaceful protests. Trump and others in his administration called those protesting the killing of George Floyd
-
Turkish authorities are investigating several senior doctors who lead “medical chambers” - professional bodies - in Van, Mardin, and Sanhurfa and have been accused since March 2020 of “issuing threats to create fear and panic among the public” in media interviews and social media posts relating to
-
Even though the scientific jury is still out on whether and how long post-COVID-19 immunity will last, proof of having recovered from the illness is an asset in renting out an apartment on Airbnb, US companies are beginning to develop an immunity passport for hotels, and the Chilean government is
-
Brazilian supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to resume publishing complete COVID-19 statistics. The government had purged the health ministry website of historical pandemic-related data and said it would stop publishing the cumulative death toll and
-
Russian authorities are considering introducing an app that migrant workers will be required to download when they enter the country. Leaked details indicate that the app would contain detailed biometric data, health status, police records, and a “social trustworthiness” rating. It’s unclear whether
-
Speaking at COGx, the Tony Blair Institute said the UK should bring in digital health passports to let people travel if they are free of coronavirus. When he was in government, former UK prime minister Tony Blair, who founded the Institute, sought to bring in ID cards; they were scrapped in 2010
-
The lives of residents in French and Scottish nursing homes have been put in danger by the homes’ use of Dahua and Hikvision fever scanning cameras. The homes are violating ISO standards for such cameras: they have been incorrectly installed in front of large windowed doors, the staff are not given
-
Data-driven companies like Experian, CACI, and Xantura are pitching their services to help UK local officials to identify people in need. Xantura and CIPFA, the accountancy body for the public sector, have teamed up to deploy a £15,000 tool that uses local authority data including the NHS’s
-
As the mounting infection numbers and deaths took Brazil to second-worst affected in the world, the country took down the website on which it had been publishing daily, weekly, and monthly figures non infections and deaths in Braziliant states. A newspaper that supports president Jair Bolsonaro
-
It's been two months since the launch of "Perú en us manos", the mobile app promoted by the Peruvian government amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Until now the app did not accomplish the ambitious goals it set out to. On its first month the app had detected 1400 risk zones while there where already 36
-
An Israeli government panel tasked with managing the coronavirus crisis green-lighted a bill that would write into law the government’s authority to impose emergency regulations and froze a bill that would allow the Shin Bet security agency to track confirmed and suspected coronavirus patients. The
-
UK police reported to be planning separate contact tracing system Police forces in the UK are planning their own contact tracing system because they are concerned that giving details to the national contact tracing system would compromise undercover operations and working methods. Options under
-
Hours before OpenDemocracy filed suit to compel the UK government to release all the contracts governing its deals with a list of technology firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and Faculty, the UK government released the contracts. Faculty is being paid more than £1 million to
-
Estonia has begun testing its Immuunsuspass app, which was developed for the Back to Work NGO by the Estonian technology firms Transferwise and Guardtime working with health specialists. The app, which is intended to help schools and employers make decisions, will have to pass scientific consensus
-
Kenya’s Independent Policing Oversight Body reports that it received 87 complaints covering 31 incidents in which injuries were linked to the actions of police officers and 15 deaths between curfew’s imposition on March 27 and June 5. In April, Human Rights Watch accused the police of brutality in
-
After problems with its TraceTogether contact tracing app, Singapore is planning a comprehensive contact tracing system in which it will distribute to all its 5.7 million residents a wearable device that will identify people who have interacted with people carrying the coronavirus. The devices can
-
The Canary Islands sought to become the first destination for a coronavirus-free flight as part of a digital health passport pilot project backed by the World Health Organisation. Via the Hi+Card secure health mobile app that certifies they do not have COVID-19, each passenger will have a unique
-
In the three months from March to May 2020 the UK government awarded at least £1.7 billion in contracts to private companies, most of them without a competitive tender process under emergency procurement measures put in place in March. A quarter of the 400 contracts that government departments have
-
Gypsy and Traveller communities in England, especially those living on canals and waterways or in unauthorised roadside encampments, have had no access to sanitation, refuse collection, or water for drinking, cooking, showering, and washing clothes during the coronavirus lockdown. Some local
-
The app-based track-and-trace system that was supposed to be in place in the UK by June 1 will not be working at full speed until September or October, and the chief executive of Serco, one of the main companies contracted to deliver it, doubted the system would evolve smoothly. Scientists have said
-
When Dallas police posted on Twitter asking for videos of the protests taking place after George Floyd's killing, a flood of videos and images of K-pop stars were uploaded to its anonymous iWatch Dallas tip-off app. Law enforcement can call on vast numbers of networked cameras - from cars, food and
-
Within days of the announcement that the UK's new Joint Biosecurity Centre would be run by Tom Hurd, the Home Office's head of counter-terrorism, the government announced that instead it would be moved to the Department of Health and led by Clara Swinson, a senior health official responsible for
-
The lack of data protection laws and the absence of a privacy commission are contributing factors to Pakistan’s failure to investigate or remedy security flaws in the country’s recently-launched COVID-19 tracking technology, which partially depends on a system originally developed to combat
-
Zoom said it would deliver end-to-end encryption as one of a number of security enhancements to its service, but it will only be available to enterprise and business customers whose identity they can verify and not on the free service. The company says it wants to be able to work with law
-
The AI firm Faculty, which worked on the Vote Leave campaign, was given a £400,000 UK government contract to analyse social media data, utility bills, and credit ratings, as well as government data, to help in the fight against the coronavirus. This is at least the ninth contract awarded to Faculty
-
A mix of city data and reports from building superintendents and porters provides evidence on how New York City’s residents’ behaviour has changed during the lockdown. Among the findings so far: residents are recycling 27% more, particularly clear glass, and total garbage collected has dropped
-
While the agency that manages residence permits, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, is closed, Israel has instructed Palestinians seeking to verify whether their permits to remain in Israel are still valid to download the app Al Munasiq, which grants the military access to
-
While acknowledging the WHO’s advice that retaining antibodies to the coronavirus after recovering from COVID-19 is not yet scientifically confirmed to confer immunity, the International Air Transport Association believes that immunity passports could be important in helping air travel resume
-
Thermal temperature scanners, software keystroke monitors, and wearable location trackers are proliferating in US workplaces, with the data they collect outside of any of the country's electronic privacy laws. Companies report that employers are being asked to form part of the front line of contact
-
Concerns that contact tracing could expand to purposes beyond public health gained some weight when the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington told press that law enforcement was using “contact tracing” to investigate protesters arrested after the murder of George Floyd
-
Between March 29 and May 28, residents of Nashville, Tennessee submitted 3,748 reports of potential violations of the Safe at Home order, including locations such as restaurants, parks, churches, and funeral homes, and violations such as promoting live music while it was prohibited, or failing to
-
During the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, US police took advantage of a lack of regulation and new technologies to expand the scope of people and platforms they monitor; details typically emerge through lawsuits, public records disclosures, and stories released by police department PR
-
The Delaware County of New Castle is participating in a pro-bono programme run by the Cambridge, Massachusetts start-up Biobot Analytics, which analyses sewage for the coronavirus in order to estimate the number of people infected in a particular area, hoping to use the results to make better health
-
Italy has launched Immuni, one of the first contact tracing apps based on the Apple-Google API. The app is opt-in, and includes an explanation of the privacy and security measures in its setup. The app collects anonymously bluetooth tokens that are automatically randomised, but does not collect GPS
-
In late May, shortly before Italian domestic travel was set to reopen, Stefano Bonaccini, the governor of Emilia-Romagna, called Sardinia’s proposed health passports “unmanageable”, although Sicily and some other southern regions popular among tourists were also in favour of using them to ensure
-
The UK's NHSx contact tracing initiative requires anyone who tests positive for COVID-19 to provide the full name, postcode/house number, phone number, and email of anyone they've been in contact with, and Public Health England will keep the data for 20 years. The privacy notice was quickly updated
-
The Chinese city of Hangzhou is considering making the app it requires residents to download and install for the COVID-19 crisis and that controls whether and where residents may travel a permanent fixture to create a "firewall to enhance people's health and immunity". Other countries may follow
-
Lithuania’s data protection authority has suspended the country’s COVID-19 contact tracing app for failing to comply with GDPR’s principle of accountability at the Lithuanian health ministry, which is the relevant data controller. It investigated the app in response to media coverage and public
-
The lower house of the French parliament paved the way for the launch of the government's independently-developed contact tracing app. The minister in charge, technology minister Cedric O, praised the app, developed by companies such as Orange and Dassault Systemes, as a French project "with the
-
Immunity passports, under consideration in a number of countries, may violate US disability law, enable discrimination, and create a two-tiered exclusionary society. They are not really comparable to vaccination cards for diseases such as yellow fever or meningitis, which are required for entry into
-
Police have ordered protests in Hong Kong to stop, citing social distancing rules. The renewed protests are to oppose the Chinese plan to write a new national security law for Hong Kong, as well as a separate plan by Hong Kong officials to criminalise disrespect for the Chinese national anthem. Many
-
An Ipsos MORI survey conducted on May 20-22 found generally high levels of compliance with lockdown restrictions, though many were suffering. While roughly three-quarters were confident they could download and operate a contact tracing app and would be willing to comply with its recommendations
-
NHS Digital has added facial recognition to its app, which allows people to order prescriptions, book appointments, and find health care data, in hopes it will also be usable as an "immunity passport" once at-home testing becomes available. The NHS facial recognition system was built by iProov, and
-
China is adding new features to its coronavirus surveillance app, which has helped many workers and employers return to their former lives, and looks likely to become a permanent fixture. Zhou Jiangyong, the Communist Party secretary of the eastern city of Hangzhou, has said the city's app, which it
-
Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people in England are 54% more likely than white people to be fined for violations of the coronavirus rules, according to an analysis of data published by the National Police Chiefs' Council showing the racial breakdown of the 13,445 fixed-penalty notices recorded
-
South Korea's second spike in coronavirus cases was curbed via a contact tracing regime that uses credit card records, mobile phone tracking, and GPS location data in order to track the previous movements of infected individuals working alongside efficient diagnostic testing. Successfully tracing an
-
Numerous companies are repurposing their body monitors, asset trackers, and electronic ankle monitors and marketing them to the newly-created market for strap-on surveillance bracelets to enforce quarantine and social distancing including companies such as AiRISTA Flow. Redpoint Positioning
-
Latvia became one of the first countries to use Apple's and Google's new joint toolkit to launch a smartphone contact tracing app, Apturi Covid. For now, the app will only work for Latvia's 2 million citizens, but the intention is that it should interoperate with the apps other countries to aid
-
Anger spread across Chinese social media after officials in the eastern city of Hangzhou suggested they would create a permanent version of its smartphone-based health rating app, developed with help from Alibaba, to curb coronavirus spread. Shortly before, Baidu’s chief executive proposed new rules
-
EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides told health ministers in late May that they could not count on immunity certification when lifting cross-border travel restrictions within the EU. Prevention measures such as physical distancing, robust testing strategies, and ensuring health care capacity
-
Local health authorities in Germany have relied on human contact tracers since the country confirmed its first COVID-19 cases early in 2020, and say that doing so has helped the country keep its death rate comparatively low even with a less restrictive lockdown than many other countries. Germany
-
As part of a survey of the human rights compliance of contact tracing apps Amnesty International's Security Lab discovered that security vulnerabilities in Qatar's mandatory contact tracing app, EHTERAZ, would have allowed attackers to access the personal information, including name, national ID
-
Contact tracing apps will only work effectively if people trust them and install them in sufficient numbers. Soon after its launch, however, the North Dakota contact tracing app people were already dropping it after posting complaints in the Google App store. In a survey of 798 Americans
-
The best contact tracers in US history were a group of mid-20th century venereal disease investigators working for a programme at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whose strategy eventually led to the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s. Talking to infected people and tracking down
-
Excluded groups such as sex workers and asylum seekers are being left behind in the UK’s COVID-19 response as control measures amplify existing health inequalities and put life-saving advice and care further out of reach. The closure of services and some GP registrations, a lack of access to
-
Following a similar effort in the Netherlands, the UK is planning a national research programme in collaboration with universities, water companies, and public research bodies to detect coronavirus in sewage for use as an early warning system for future outbreaks of COVID-19. About half of those
-
Technical flaws in Moscow's app, intended to track people with COVID-19 and symptoms of other respiratory diseases, led the authorities to wrongly fine hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people, alleging they had breached self-quarantine. The app was originally launched at the end of March, but
-
As the waning pandemic leads to signs that the protest movement is resuming, China is moving to draft new national security legislation and incorporate it into Hong Kong's Basic Law, bypassing the territory's Legislative Council. Elections for the Council are due to be held in September, and Chinese
-
Immunity passports are likely to increase discrimination and threaten fairness and public health - and won't work for practical reasons. First and foremost, scientists do not yet know whether infection confers immunity or for how long; the serological tests so far developed are insufficiently
-
As Europeans went back to work and social spaces in early summer 2020, they discovered that these had been newly equipped with a variety of technologies that brought surveillance with them as the price of preventing a resurgence of the coronavirus. Among the tools being adopted: a Romware Covid
-
The outsourcing company Serco, which the UK government has contracted to perform contact tracing, accidentally shared the email addresses of almost 300 of the contact tracers it hired when a staff member sent an introductory email and used CC rather than blind CC. Serco does not intend to refer
-
More than 6 million Australians downloaded the government’s COVIDSafe contact tracing app after being told it was necessary to help health officials track future coronavirus outbreaks. In late May, a software developer found a flaw in the app that would allow someone with a relatively simple
-
Both COVID-19 mortality and the economic impact of the virus-related closures are disproportionately affecting the UK’s ethnic minorities after taking age and location into account, exacerbating existing inequalities and reversing what had appeared to be progress. There are also concerns about child
-
In its final report, the expert group appointed by the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care Services to assess the security and privacy of the country's COVID-19 contact tracing app, "Smittestopp", concluded that the app handles neither responsibly. The group recommended removing all data once it's
-
After the CEO of NHSx told the the UK parliament that data harvested by the NHSx contact tracing app would be retained for future research, the UK Ministry of Defence said it would turn the data over to its Jhub to sanitise the data and remove all personally identifying information before passing it
-
In late May, Florida fired Rebekah Jones, its geographic information system manager and architect of the state’s COVID-19 data and surveillance dashboard. The dashboard was praised on TV two weeks earlier by Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task
-
The UK's Project OASIS collects data from third-party app providers that are collecting COVID-19 symptoms and demographic data to help the NHS respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ministry of Defence Strategic Command's technology innovation hub, JHub, has been brought in to provide assistance and
-
The EFF is opposing a California bill, AB 2004, that would authorise the issuers of COVID-19 test results to provide them with blockchain-based verifiable credentials that could enable individuals to resume work, travel, or any other activity where verification of a COVID-19 test would be needed
-
Cameras repurposed as "fever-detecting" aren't designed for and are not very good at detecting infections, but businesses, airlines, major employers, and public officials are nonetheless reacting to the coronavirus pandemic by spending large sums to buy them without understanding their limitations
-
As part of its pandemic-related emergency measures, in April the Scottish government extended the deadline for public bodies to respond to freedom of information requests to 40 days. A month later, it was forced to withdraw the changes after opposition parties on the Scottish parliament's COVID-19
-
After governments in many parts of the world began mandating wearing masks when out in public, researchers in China and the US published datasets of images of masked faces scraped from social media sites to use as training data for AI facial recognition models. Researchers from the startup
-
In a preprint study of primary sewage sludge from a northeastern US metropolitan area, researchers detected SARS-CoV-2 RNA in all environmental samples and found that the concentrations of virus RNA were highly correlated with the COVID-19 epidemiological curve and local hospital admissions. The RNA
-
Researchers are scraping social media posts for images of mask-covered faces to use to improve facial recognition algorithms. In April, researchers published to Github the COVID19 Mask Image Dataset, which contains more than 1,200 images taken from Instagram; in March, Wuhan researchers compiled the
-
Academics have disclosed today a new vulnerability in the Bluetooth wireless protocol, broadly used to interconnect modern devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and smart IoT devices. The vulnerability, codenamed BIAS ( Bluetooth Impersonation Attack S), impacts the classic version of the
-
On 21 April 2020, it was published in the Official Gazette of Mexico City that 4,264 non-salaried workers would be granted basic economic support in a single payment to cope with the health emergency. The Ministry of Labour and Employment Promotion (STyFE) had the possibility to launch this
-
In March the Dutch government announced that a contact tracing app would become the core of its testing policy. Of the 750 proposals it received in response to its open tender, 63 were long-listed; however, none of the seven finalists met the privacy and security criteria. Research simulating the
-
La Quadrature du Net and La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme have won a ruling from the Conseil d’État, France’s highest administration court, making drones equipped with cameras and flying low enough to detect individuals by their clothing or a distinctive sign illegal. During the lockdown, French
-
France, like the UK, opted to develop its own contact tracing app. "StopCovid", using a centralised design developed by the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proxity Tracing (PEPP-PT) group, which created a framework called ROBust and the privacy-presERving proximity Tracing protocol (ROBERT). French
-
Many of India’s informal workforce of 450 million people - 90% of the total workforce - were abruptly closed out of their places of employment when prime minister Narendra Modi abruptly ordered a lockdown in April. Left without pay, unable to stay in their living conditions, and with only limited
-
In mid-May two people living in or adjacent to the world’s largest refugee settlement, the Rohingya camps in southern Bangladesh, tested positive for COVID-19, leading aid workers to fear catastrophic effects on both the Rohingya themselves and Bangladesh in general. By the end of May another 132
-
More than 3 million people in the UK have downloaded the JoinZoe COVID Symptom Tracker, which was designed by doctors and scientists at King's College London, Guys and St Thomas' Hospitals working in partnership with the health science company ZOE Global Ltd and endorsed by governments and NHS in
-
The Slovak Constitutional Court declared unconstitutional parts of the newly amended telecommunication law that permitted state authorities to access telcommunications data for the purposes of contact tracing. The parliament approved the legislation in March, but the court ruled that the need for
-
In designing its Healthy Together contact tracing app, the US state of Utah opted for a GPS and Bluetooth-based design created by social media startup Twenty; it does not use the Google-Apple API. The goal is for the app to assist the 1,200 Utah Department of Health workers who are doing phone call
-
Taking advantage of the pandemic to close US borders, the Trump administration is also spreading coronavirus infection by deporting detainees to receiving countries such as Guatemala, where 20% of infections are deportees. Guatemala has only two hospitals and a scattering of smaller regional medical
-
A New Zealand Subway restaurant suspended an employee for sending texts and social media requests on Facebook, Instagram, among others to a female customer online after she gave the restaurant her personal information as part of a contact tracing effort. The restaurant has since adopted a new
-
Tom Hurd, a senior Home Office counter-terrorism official who was at Eton and Oxford with prime minister Boris Johnson, will lead the UK’s newly-established biosecurity centre; Hurd remains a candidate to take over as the next director general of MI6 later in 2020. Hurd, who has worked as a diplomat
-
The controversial Israeli spyware company NSO Group's US arm, Westbridge, has been trying to pitch its phone hacking software to US law enforcement agencies such as the San Diego Police Department, particularly a tool called "Phantom", which the complany claims can overcome encryption, track
-
Any user of India's Aaorgya Setu contact tracing app can now request deletion of the data they've entered according to the Aaorgya Seta Emergency Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, which specifies the definition, collection, processing, and storage of the data the app collects. The
-
The Manchester-based cybersecurity company VST Enterprises is working a digital health company Circle Pass Enterprises to create the “Covi-pass” digital health passport intended to allow holders to work and travel safely. The Covi-pass uses a colour system of red, green, and amber to indicate
-
In mid-May, the Chilean health minister, Jame Mañalich, postponed the planned launch that would have made the country the first in the world to issue “immunity passports” on the basis that it could trigger discrimination in the job market. The decision was approved by experts from the Chilean
-
Authorities in South Korea, which had been successful in containing the coronavirus early on due to its aggressive testing programme, began trying to trace more than 5,500 people who visited a group of bars between April 2 and May 6 because a single infected customer led to a new outbreak. More than
-
The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh created a COVID-19 dashboard that displayed the names of at least 5,400 quarantined people, their device IDs and names, their OS version, app version codes, current GPS coordinates, and office GPS coordinates. Shortly after the dashboard's existence was posted on
-
A number of incidents in which Zoom events in education settings were disrupted led the New York City school district to ban the use of Zoom for remote learning. Among the Zoombombing incidents: saboteurs inserted racist and anti-Semitic messages into a virtual graduation ceremony at Oklahoma City
-
Under the country's emergency laws, on May 4 the Hungarian government announced it would suspend parts of GDPR and exempted authorities from key provisions such as subject access rights, the right to request erasures, and providing notice that personal information is being collected and stored as
-
The Australian journalist Chris Buckley, who reports for the New York Times, was forced to leave China on April 10 after 24 years of reporting on the country, bringing the number of journalists forced out of the country in the last year to 19. After travelling to Wuhan to report on the unfolding
-
The Egyptian president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, has approved 18 amendments to the country's emergency law that allow him and security agencies additional powers. Only five of the amendments are clearly related to public health. Along with closing schools and universities, quarantining people
-
At a press conference, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that microchipping everyone, beginning with children returning to school and kindergarten as the coronavirus lockdown ends; the chip would sound an alarm whenever anyone gets too close much as a car does. Security experts
-
As part of their preparations to ease the lockdown, French authorities have added AI tools into the CCTV cameras in the Paris Metro to detect the number of passengers who are wearing face masks. The system is also being used in outdoor markets and buses in Cannes. Although it is mandatory to wear a
-
Among the regulations governing restaurants as the US State of Maine's moves into a phased reopening is a requirement to maintain customer records for contact tracing purposes, including one customer's name and contact information per party and those of the table's server. The regulations also
-
Colombia will adopt the Apple-Google contact tracing platform after finding it necessary to remove the contact tracing functions from CoronApp, the official Colombian coronavirus information app because they didn’t work. CoronApp was downloaded by 4.3 million people, and includes features to report
-
In a technical analysis of the UK NHSx contact tracing app for iOS, security engineers find that Apple's Bluetooth design makes it harder to detect iPhones running the app in background mode, and the app is using "keepalive" notifications in order to keep the app able to make the necessary
-
In Colombia, Peru, and Panama, quarantine regulations assign men and women different days to go out. For transgender people, these gender-based restrictions mean discrimination and violence for law enforcement and others, leading to numerous complaints. In Bogota, where law enforcement has been
-
The Australian government reported soon after releasing its CovidSafe contact tracing app that the app doesn’t work properly on iPhones because it doesn’t use Apple’s Exposure Notification framework and the Bluetooth functions deteriorate if the app isn’t kept running in the foreground. The
-
Shortly after launch, security researcher Baptiste Robert discovered that India's contact tracing app, Aarogya Setu ("Health Bridge"), allows users to spoof their GPS location, find out how many people reported themselves as infected within any 500-metre radius, and mount a triangulation attack to
-
Serbian MPs voted 155-0, with one not voting and one abstention, to lift the state of emergency that was declared on March 15 and repeal 11 emergency ordinances covering work, tax, debt, and criminal justice on the basis that the conditions for lifting it have been met. The change lifts curfews and
-
On the day South Korea relaxed its social distancing measures, a 29-year-old man tested positive for COVID-19. The previous weekend, he had visited five nightclubs in the gay district of Itweon in Seoul, mingling with around 7,200 other people. After nearly 80 new COVID-19 cases have been linked to
-
After a call from a vendor, India's state-owned Broadcast Engineering Consultants Limited (BECIL) put out an expression of interest for electronic bracelets and accompanying software for use to ensure that COVID-19 patients do not violate their quarantine orders. A hundred companies responded. BECIL
-
In April, as the crisis in Italy began to ease, some Italian health officials and politicians, among them Luca Zaia, the regional president of the northeastern region of Veneto, began to propose a “Covid Pass” that would Italians who have antibodies showing they have had and recovered from the
-
A parliamentary panel granted Israel's Shin Bet security service an additional three weeks to use mobile phone data to track people infected with the coronavirus; prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had requested a six-week extension while his government drafts legislation to regulate the data use in
-
The German health minister, Jens Spahn, said the country required advice from the country’s ethics council before it could use the millions of antibody tests it had procured from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche to help determine how freely people could move around the country. Spahn cited the
-
In April, the US state of North Carolina's Dare County enacted a series of emergency declarations that establish checkpoints at all points where roads cross the county borders; travellers show an ID card with a Dare County address or a county-issued permit in order to enter the county. Dare County
-
Immunity passports would impose artificial restrictions on who can and cannot participate in social, civic, and economic activities, and create a perverse incentive for individuals, particularly those who can’t afford a period of exclusion, to seek out infection, posing a health risk to anyone they
-
The rush to incorporate greater safety from the coronavirus is bringing with it a new wave of workplace surveillance as companies install tracking software to determine who may have been exposed and which areas need deep cleaning if an employee gets infected; monitor social distancing; and use
-
The International Press Institute has found that in both democratic and autocratic states the public health crisis has given governments the excuse of preventing the spread of disinformation to exercise control over the media, whether by criminalising journalism or controlling the public narrative
-
Only 16% of Australians had downloaded the country's COVIDSafe app by May 3, a week after its launch on April 26, even though most said they support the federal government's coronavirus contact tracing app. In an Ipsos poll, 80% of those who said they were unlikely to download the app cited privacy
-
The state of Utah gave the AI company Banjo real time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV, and public safety cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles, and other data that the company says it's combining with information collected from social media, satellites, and
-
At least 27 countries are using data from cellphone companies to track the movements of their citizens, and at least 30 have developed smartphone apps for the public to download. Fewer objections have been raised in countries with greater levels of success in containing the virus. However, although
-
A security lapse exposed one of the core databases of the coronavirus self-test symptom checker app launched by India's largest cellphone network, Jio, shortly before the government lockdown began in late March. The database, which had no password protection and contained millions of logs and
-
Six weeks after British prime minister Boris Johnson imposed a lockdown, many workers in non-essential jobs across many sectors of the economy were nonetheless being forced to continue working in potentially dangerous situations such as call centres, offices, factories, warehouses, and English
-
The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI, which came to public attention for scraping billions of photos off social media sites to create a comprehensive facial recognition system, says it has offered to help US federal and three state agencies with contact tracing. The company
-
As the first confirmed coronavirus case in Pakistan, Yahyah Jaffery became a pariah after his identity, photograph, and home address were leaked on social media. Similar leaks about dozens of other patients and medical staff followed. The contact tracing system being used for coronavirus was
-
The Indian authorities have said that the country's contact-tracing app, Aarogya Setu ("health bridge", in Sanskrit), will be voluntary - but mandatory for federal government employees, food delivery workers, and some other service providers. It may also be needed to access public transport and
-
INTERNETLAB offers an extensive analysis of all the eight different Covid-19 related apps being discussed in Brazil at the moment. Apps were rated according to four parameters: consent, need, transparency and security. Besides this, the organisation takes a look into what permissions which app has
-
The central Thailand province of Chachoengsao has launched Mor Channa, a COVID-19 tracking mobile phone app, to help individuals assess whether they are in a high-risk area for COVID-19. Energy Absolute PLC, one of the companies that helped develop the app, believes that the app's tracking system
-
Two million people downloaded Australia's COVIDSafe app in the first four days it was available; the government's goal is to reach 10 million, or about 40% of the population. Users are asked for a (not necessarily real) name, age, mobile number, and postal code. The app exchanges a Bluetooth
-
Sweden's Lund University has launched an app intended to map the spread of the coronavirus across Sweden, a localised version of the JoinZOE COVID Symptom Tracker app pioneered in the UK, which the researchers believe could be coupled with seroprovalence testing in order to develop an accurate map
-
Researchers at the University of Cape Town are developing the smartphone app COVI-ID to help the South African government track people who may not know they have contracted COVID-19, as well as people who have come into contact with those who have tested positive. The app will use Bluetooth and
-
Numerous efforts to create apps to help monitor and map the spread of COVID-19 rely on satnav-based location data from Galileo. The CovTrack app developed on a pro-bono basis by the Romanian company RISE, for example, uses Bluetooth connections between mobile phones to store identification data the
-
As part of considering how to reopen tourism, the Greek Ministry of Tourism is considering introducing a “health passport” to be used as proof that the carrier is not infected with COVID-19. The test will be performed before the traveller leaves their country of origin. To begin with, the scheme
-
Amazon has spent $10 million to buy 1,500 cameras to take the temperature of workers from the Chinese firm Zhejiang Dahua Technology Company even though the US previously blacklisted Dahua because it was alleged to have helped China detain and monitor the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. The
-
Hawaii governor David Ige has ordered all travellers to the island US state arriving between March 26 and May 31 to self-quarantine for 14 days. Violating the order is a criminal offence and subject to a $5,000 fine and up to a year's imprisonment. In addition, the Department of Transportation
-
In February, before the pandemic was declared, the Myanmar Post and Telecommunications Department set a deadline of April 30 for citizens to register their mobile phone SIMs, a move the PTD said was necessary to enhance the security of electronic transactions and cut down crime. The PTD issued an
-
The Israeli company Cellebrite, best known for providing hacking software to help law enforcement agencies get inside suspects' iPhones, is now pitching its technology to help authorities pull the location data and contacts off the phones of newly-diagnosed COVID-19 patients in order to "quarantine
-
Many of the technologies used to combat the coronavirus pandemic, including monitoring and analysing social media posts, telecommunications location data, and the use of sensors, were first tested on refugees during the 2015 crisis and are now being repurposed in the name of public health. In 2019
-
An audit of two apps and a website used by national and local governments in Colombia finds: an absence of public information about the tools, how they work, or how their security and privacy is protected; non-compliance with Colombia’s data protection legal framework, particularly in the area of
-
Human Rights Watch finds problems with immunity passports Human Rights Watch considers the first proposals for immunity passports and suggests that although antibody testing is useful for ensuring the safety of frontline workers or giving a good idea of the percentage of a population that remains
-
At a cost to itself of £88,000 a week in salaries alone, Palantir has committed 45 engineers to a government data project intended to help predict surges in demand for the NHS during the pandemic. The company will be paid £1 a week for its work. Besides Palantir's work supporting the US Immigration
-
The mother of a six-month-old baby in Aurora, Ontario was fined C$880 after police accused her of standing for more than two minutes under a gazebo in a park; she claims she pulled into the gazebo to allow people to pass on the path and answered a text before moving back onto the path. The mother
-
The Internet Freedom Foundation has sent a legal notice to the Broadcast Engineering Consultants India, Limited (BECIL), a public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, calling on the organisation to modify a tender seeing procurement of a "Personnel Tracking GPS
-
A reverse-engineering analysis of Vietnam's official Bluetooth-based contact tracing app, Bluezone, which was developed by a coalition of local technology companies and the Ministry of Information and Communications, shows that the app is broadcasting a fixed six-character ID the app assigned to
-
Three days after announcing Germany would adopt the centralised Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) standard for contact tracing, the country's chancellery minister Helge Braun and health minister Jens Spahn announced they would instead use the decentralised approach backed
-
The automated facial recognition company Clearview AI has suggested to US federal and state authorities that its facial biometrics could leverage cameras already in place at gyms and retailers in order to identify individuals in the interests of contact tracing. Simultaneously, the company is asking
-
The Pakistani government has repurposed a system designed by the country's spy agency, inter-Services Intelligence for tracking down terrorists to trace suspected COVID-19 cases. Prime minister Imran Khan has said that efficient tracking and testing of coronavirus-infected people is the only way to
-
Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Jamaica, and Ecuador have all asked the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to screen migrants in detention for COVID-19 before deporting them. At least 85 deported Guatemalans have tested positive, accounting for about a fifth of all the cases reported in
-
At least four law enforcement agencies in the US - two in California, and one in each of Maryland and Texas - are using drones to communicate with homeless people about maintaining social distance because encampments are located in areas that are difficult to access and police do not have to visit
-
Blockchain timestamping supplier Guardtime, French health data manager OpenHealth, and Swiss authentication and tracing technologies company SICPA Group have jointly proposed the COVID-19 secured immunity passport. The proposed immunity passport would serve as the basis for real-time monitoring of a
-
Our partners from Unwanted Witness in Uganda wrote a formal letter to the Ministry of Information Communications Technology and National Guidance demanding for strict observance of human rights for any intended use of surveillance technologies to fight COVID-19. In a letter addressed to the
-
Our partners from Tedic in Paraguay analysed a government proposal to use drones to enforce the lockdown measures in that country (in Spanish). Link: https://www.tedic.org/uso-de-drones-covid19/
-
Citing privacy concerns, the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee voted to block the Israeli government’s request for an extension to police powers to requisition mobile phone roaming data relating to those ordered to quarantine for enforcement purposes. Access had been granted for a
-
Police will be barred from accessing metadata collected by Australia's proposed coronavirus contact tracing app, which will be able to identify when users have been 1.5 metres of each other for more than 15 minutes, Australia's government services minister, Stuart Robert, and prime minister, Scott
-
The French government asked Apple to change the way its phones handle Bluetooth in order to accommodate the design of its contact tracing app. Downloading and installing the app will be voluntary, but the app will use a centralised design in which the data will be fed into a government server for
-
Our partners from the Centre for Internet & Society in India wonder themselves whether the use of an official chatbot to advance ‘right information’ is the most efficient way to handle misinformation?. In a recent example, a ministry released advisories on how homeopathy can prevent the coronavirus
-
On April 20 Hong Kong authorities arrested some of the most prominent anti-China activists. The need to clear the streets to protect public health during the COVID-19 outbreak provided the authorities an opportunity to cripple the protest movement that had spread across the country beginning in mid
-
By May 11, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, working with EFPL and ETH Zurich, will launch a secure, decentralised system for contact tracing developed by the Decentralised Privacy-Preserving-Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) international consortium, whose Swiss partners are Ubique and
-
Our partners from Karisma in Colombia analysed three different technological solutions intending to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, finding vulnerabilities in them (in Spanish). Link: https://web.karisma.org.co/que-sabemos-de-las-tres-herramientas-que-se-anuncian-como-soluciones-tecnologicas-para
-
Many of the steps suggested in a draft programme for China-style mass surveillance in the US are being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the pandemic, perhaps due to the overlap of membership between the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the body
-
The US Department of Health and Human Services has awarded a contract to build a database system, HHS Protect Now, to track the spread of the coronavirus across the US to the data-mining company Palantir. Palantir founder and investor Peter Thiel was US president Donald Trump's earliest and highest
-
A data breach that posted 100 to 200 names, email addresses, and encrypted passwords online was found in the Belgian Covid-19 Alert! app, one of seven candidates for adoption by the Dutch government. The app identifies phones that have been close to each other via Bluetooth signals and can send them
-
To speed up daily temperature checks, Amazon has installed thermal cameras to screen workers for coronavirus symptoms in its warehouses around the world. Cases of COVID-19 have been reported at more than 50 of the company's US warehouses. Thermal cameras will also replace thermometers at staff
-
Turkey's Health Ministry has launched a smartphone app that allows people to self-report symptoms, provides information on nearby hospitals, pharmacies, supermarkets, and public transport stops, detects if the user has come into contact with others who pose a risk, and provides up-to-date
-
The Legislative and Constitutional Affairs Committee at the Egyptian Parliament approved 18 new amendments to section three of the country's emergency law granting the president additional powers to implement health and safety measures to curb the spread of COVID-19. The new powers include
-
Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health has released a new mobile app, "Stay Home", to ensure those asked to self-quarantine are abiding by the isolation rules. Everyone subject to quarantine is expected to download the app and create a user name and password; the user must also grant access to camera
-
Among several other digital contact tracing options, the New Zealand government is considering distributing Bluetooth enabled credit card-sized "CovidCards" to all 5 million New Zealanders. The card solves some problems such as lack of access to or comfort with smartphones for 19% of the population
-
Our partners from Derechos Digitales analysed the Chilean Government App to respond to the Corona Virus, saying that it will likely be useless and infringing on existing privacy rights (in Spanish) Link: https://www.derechosdigitales.org/14387/coronapp-la-inutilidad-del-atajo-tecnologico-desplegado
-
Moscow's first attempts to introduce digital methods by which residents could obtain digital passes to move around the city failed as the website collapsed numerous times and the app required them to get a pass for every single move rather than only to drive a car, as the government has stated. City
-
New versions of drones that currently issue audio warnings reminding people in Elizabeth, New Jersey to observe social distancing guidelines will incorporate sensors and fever-detecting cameras that will monitor if people are sick or failing to social distance on the trails and in the parks of
-
Liechtenstein is the first European country to use biometric electronic bracelets to implement a real time coronavirus tracking programme. The bracelet, which sends skin temperature, breathing, and pulse, among other metrics, for analysis in a Swiss lab, is being offered to 5% of the population. The
-
In early April, police in a UK park violated their own social distancing guidelines to order ITN journalist Michael Segalov to go home when he began filming the same police appearing to harass a distressed woman. Segalov's solicitors at ITN followed up by filing a letter of complaint demanding an
-
Since the Azarebaijani government imposed the lockdown to slow the spread of COVID-19 the authorities have sentenced at least six activists and a pro-opposition journalist to detention for between ten and 30 days on charges including breaking lockdown rules or disobeying police orders. Almost all of
-
The travel bans and border controls instituted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 jeopardise refugees’ access to international protection, bringing the right to leave any country and seek asylum into direct collision with the human right to life. Source: https://www.kaldorcentre.unsw.edu.au
-
North Macedonia is the first country in the Western Balkans to launch a contact-tracing app. The government has stressed that the Bluetooth-based app, StopKorona!, complies with all legal privacy requirements. The app follows a decentralised design, so that users maintain full control over their
-
Eight days after instituting a gender-based quarantine schedule, Peruvian president Martin Vizcarra cancelled the measure two days before it was due to end. It had been met with a backlash from LGBTQ+ activists, who feared trans and binary people would face increasing street harassment from police
-
India's COVID-19 tracker app, Aarogya Setu, was downloaded 50 million times in the first 13 days it was available. Developed by the National Informatics Centre a subsidiary of the Ministry of Electronics and IT, the app is available on both Android and iOS smartphones, and uses GPS and Bluetooth to
-
The Department of Health in the US state of Kansas is tracking residents' locations via a platform called Unacast, which compares aggregated GPS mobile phone data from before and after the implementation of social distancing and grades each county on its compliance. As of April 1, 45 of 105 Kansas
-
The Venezuelan government has ramped up quarantine enforcement in the Catia barrio in Caracas by issuing permits that allow only one family member out at a time and only before noon, and setting up 40 checkpoints. Many residents had flouted regulations in the barrio, home to 400,000 of Venezuela's
-
The Australian government's planned contact tracing app will reportedly be based on Singapore's TraceTogether, which relies on Bluetooth connections to detect other phones in range and log the results, so that if a phone user tests positive for COVID-19 and consents their close contacts can be
-
Under Ontario's Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act, which prohibits gatherings of more than five people, public health officials in Ottawa are pushing citizens to avoid even apparently innocuous activities such as talking across a fence to a neighbour or drinking a beer on your home's
-
Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has exempted survey teams and National ID system registrars from lockdown rules on the basis that they are essential to providing cash distributions and other government responses intended to soften the impact of the community quarantine. Duterte argued that the
-
Our partners from Hiperderecho in Peru proposed 15 measures to improve the COVID-19 app that the Peruvian Government is rolling out in the country (in Spanish). Link: https://hiperderecho.org/2020/04/quince-propuestas-para-mejorar-la-aplicacion-del-gobierno-del-covid-19/
-
Our partners from Right to Know campaign in South Africa produced this infosheet to simplify what the South African government has committed to doing in ensuring that the use of surveillance does not impact negatively on people’s rights to privacy and that necessary data protections are taken into
-
GDPRHub is collecting a list of projects around the world that are using personal data to combat the novel coronavirus. The list is divided into categories such as decentralised contact tracing apps and frameworks; centralised contact tracing systems; lockdown enforcement; self-assessment apps
-
Montreal police have launched an online system to enable residents to report suspicious activity such as group gatherings after police officers noticed significant crowding in certain areas of the city. Both the Montreal police and the province's Sureté du Québec can hand out an on-the-spot $1,000
-
Ghana's opposition party, the National Democratic Congress, has blamed a spike in cases of COVID-19 on the National Identification Authority's refusal to suspend its registration efforts in the country's Eastern Region even though two citizens filed for a court injunction to halt the operation and
-
Palantir and the British AI start-up Faculty are data-mining large volumes of confidential UK patient information to consolidate government databases and build predictive computer models under contract to NHSx, the digital transformation arm of the UK's National Health Service. NHSx said the goal is
-
On April 5, Azerbaijan tightened the quarantine regime imposed on March 24 to require residents under 65 to receive permission via an SMS message before leaving their homes. Only three reasons are allowed: to visit the doctor, to visit a pharmacy, shop, bank, or post office, or attend a relative's
-
Apple and Google have announced a partnership to enable governments and health agencies to use Bluetooth for proximity-based contact tracing to help reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus while preserving user privacy and security. The effort is due to begin with the May release of APIs that
-
As part of its new state of emergency law, Cambodia's national assembly has granted the country's leader, Hun Sen, new powers to surveille telecommunications, control the press and social media, restrict freedom of movement and of assembly, seize private property, and enforce quarantine orders, as
-
On April 2 Peruvian president Martín Vizcarra issued a controversial rule that men and women must observe quarantine on different days: men may leave their homes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, while women may leave only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. No one is allowed out on Sundays
-
In a sharp drop from the beginning of Canada's lockdown, after two months only one in six Canadians left their home on weekends compared to one in three at the beginning. The marketing company Environics Analytics compiled the report by analysing a database of anonymised location data from 2.3
-
Premier League football has set up a COVID-19 testing programme that it says should soon allow socially-distanced fans to return to stadiums using technology from a company called Prenetics, which is also delivering testing for the England cricket team. Prenetics’ digital health passport links an
-
NHS England is using Yoti's digital ID card solution to verify health care workers' identity; the cards are added to staff phones, enbaling them to use a contactless ID app to prove their identity both online and offline. Yoti is providing the system for free for three months to all public health
-
In order to enforce mandatory 14-day quarantine orders, Kenyan authorities have been tracking mobile phones of people suspected to have COVID-19. Also in Kenya, police enforcement efforts have led to several deaths: three died of injuries from being beaten, one, a 13-year-old boy, was hit by a
-
The Norwegian contact tracing app, Infection Stop, relies on a centralised database to store users' GPS locations for 30 days, like its Chinese counterpart. Sumula, the company that developed the app, claims is necessary because of technical limitations in Apple's smartphone operating system iOS
-
The city of Moscow is planning to use smartphone geolocation functions to track foreign tourists' movements through the city to prevent outbreaks of COVID-19 after Russia reopens its borders. Moscow accounts for two-thirds of all cases in the country. Moscow City Hall is considering a system that
-
Our partners from Coding Rights in Brazil analysed 18 different Bills introduced to the Congress to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic (in Portuguese). Link: https://www.codingrights.org/radar-legislativo-especial-covid-19-e-tecnologia/
-
The Afghan Ministry of Public Health and Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology have launched the "corona.asan.gov.af" software to provide health advice in three English, Dari, and Pashto; using the questions embedded in the software users can evaluate themselves for the virus
-
Tanzania's Communication Regulatory Authority punished three TV stations for airing content that was "misleading and untrue" about the government's strategy on fighting coronavirus. Critics believe that TCRA objected to a report that criticised President John Magufuli for saying that churches should
-
The Turkish Health Ministry's Pandemic Isolation Tracking Project is using mobile device location data to track patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and ensure they obey the government's quarantine requirements. Violators will be sent warning messages and their information will be shared with the police
-
The risk detection company Dataminr has created an AI system that analyses social media posts to predict the next hotspots for COVID-19 outbreaks. The company claims it successfully predicted spikes seven to 13 days before they occurred - in the UK, in London, Hertfordshire, Essex, and Kent, and in
-
Thousands of Israelis have been ordered into quarantine without any right of appeal based on cellphone tracking that may be wrong because phone geolocation is insufficiently fine-grained to tell the difference between two people being in the same room and being separated by a door when dropping off
-
Ten Ugandan police officers were charged with torture after allegedly caning 38 women and forcing them to swim in mud in Elegu, a town in the northern part of the country. Police have also arrested 23 people during a raid on a shelter for homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth
-
The Kazakhstani ministry of health requires the 8,000 or so Kazakhstani citizens currently under quarantine to use the SmartAstana tracking app, which enables officials to ensure that they remain in isolation. By contrast, for the city of Almaty the ministry of the interior relies on video
-
Drone manufacturer DJI has loaned five drones equipped with voice capabilities and sirens to the US town of Elizabeth, New Jersey for use to patrol public areas and warn violators of the state's lockdown rules. The drones' messages are recordings of the mayor telling people to stop gathering
-
Oura Rings, which measure body temperature and blood pulse volume to determine heart and respiratory rate and track sleep, are the subject of a national study being jointly conducted by the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, WVU Medicine, and Oura Health in hopes it can be
-
Anyone in Egypt who suspects they or others have COVID-19 is required to immediately report it to the authorities in order to stop the spread of the virus and enable treatment. On April 1 Ahmed Refaat, a member of the parliamentary Telecommunications Committee, submitted a proposal for creating an
-
Germany's federal agency responsible for disease control and prevention, the Robert Koch Institute, has teamed up with the health technology start-up Thryve to develop an app called Corona-Datenspende ("data donation") that works with a variety of smartwatches and fitness wristbands. The app is
-
The Bangladeshi start-up Sigmind.ai has developed the WATCHCAM Mass Surveillance System, which it claims can recognise individuals even when they're wearing a mask with 87.3% accuracy - and 99.4% if they're not wearing a mask. The company began developing the system in 2019 to provide ATM security
-
Our partners from SMEX in Lebanon analysed surveillance measures in the country. Lebanon, like many other countries, has launched digital tools to help diagnose and monitor the spread of the outbreak. The tools launched by the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) do not appear to harvest data
-
Our partners from Tedic in Paraguay analysed different tech proposals from the Paraguayan government, saying that emergencies are not a 'blank check' for them to do whatever they want (in Spanish). Link: https://www.tedic.org/noesunchequeenblanco/
-
British biometric start-ups are helping the UK government create digital passports. VST Enterprises is providing a biometrics-backed digital health care passport, V-COVID, to help critical NHS and emergency services workers get back to work; the passport will incorporate test results and be included
-
Our partners from Fundación Datos Protegidos in Chile also reacted to the Chilean Government App to handle the COVID-19 situation, and listed a series of critical regulatory points, demanding a multistakeholder instance to discuss them. Link: https://datosprotegidos.org/declaracion-de-fundacion
-
Every person placed in quarantine in Bahrain will be required to wear an electronic bracelet to ensure compliance. Mohammad Ali, head of electronic government, said that people fitted with the bracelets will have to stay within 15 metres of their mobile phones, which will be linked to the bracelets
-
On request, Vodafone Australia, which has 6 million subscribers nationwide, handed the mobile phone location data of several million Australians to the federal and New South Wales governments to help them monitor whether people are following the social distancing restrictions. The governments
-
Israel's controversial NSO Group, which makes spyware that governments have used to target journalists and human rights activists, says it's in talks with Western governments to use its software to track the spread of the coronavirus. A demonstration, governments themselves, rather than NSO Group
-
Ukraine's quarantine measures in order to contain the spread of the coronavirus included prohibiting visits to parks and sports fields, banning gatherings of more than two people, requiring everyone to wear masks and carry ID cards when outside their homes, as well as closing educational
-
Google has begun publishing "COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports", which analyse the location data it collects from smartphones to create maps of aggregated changes in the movement of populations around the world. Google claims the data is "anonymised" via differential privacy, and suggests that
-
The government has issued a substantial rewrite of a controversial proposal to track people using their phones and other devices in the bid to contain Covid-19. AmaBhungane, an investigative journalism newsroom, said the first “directions” – issued last week by the minister of communications –
-
The surveillance tool supplier Cy4Gate is pitching surveillance tools to track every citizen and their contacts to multiple governments around the world, including their own. In a demonstration of the system, Governments using the system, which Cy4Gate calls "Human Interaction Tracking System (HITS)
-
New Zealand's lockdown protocol includes a system to allow the police to monitor the whereabouts of travellers returning home. On arrival at the border, incoming travellers are asked for a contact mobile number. Once Welfare has ensured they have suitable accommodation, they receive a text from NZ
-
The South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research will partner with Telkom and Samsung to create a track and trace system specifically for the South African context, which includes high levels of economic inequality, poverty, and
-
In Haiti, the National Identification Office has been extremely crowded, despite the government requirement to avoid gatherings of more than 10 people. The cards, which include a photo, name, date of birth, and registry number, are required for bank transactions and other official purposes. Source
-
Because many people were still circulating on the streets despite the lockdown order issued on March 25, Panama expanded its social distancing measures by implementing gender-based quarantine schedules from April 1 to April 12: men may leave their homes to get necessities on Mondays, Wednesdays, and
-
On April 1, Iceland launched an app that uses GPS to locate people who may have been in close contact with confirmed COVID-19 patients. A message containing a download link for the app will be sent to all Icelanders; downloading it and then agreeing to disclose GPS data are both voluntary, but for
-
On March 20, the UK's Department of Health and Social Care published a notice providing legal backing for the NHS to set aside the duty of patient confidentiality as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As long as it is to fight the coronavirus, NHS organisations and GPs may share whatever
-
Led by Germany's Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for Telecoms, technologists and scientists from at least eight countries, are working on a proximity-based contact tracing technology that complies with GDPR. The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project (PEPP-PT) is intended to
-
Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the House of representatives that efforts to combat Covid-19 would be “greatly assisted” by a mandatory biometric national ID system. The national identification system, NIDS, would require everyone to register and be linked to an individual’s unique biometric. The
-
The global secure solutions integrator SuperCom has begun piloting a modified version of the company's PureHeath platform, which incorporates a specially designed "PureCare" smartphone and "PureTag" ankle bracelet, aimed at ensuring that people comply with quarantine requirements during the
-
In one of its pandemic-related emergency orders, the Canadian province of Ontario has extended to police officers, First Nations constables, special constables, and municipal by-law enforcement officers the power to require those facing charges under the emergency laws to give their name, date of
-
As inmates are released from prison in order to mitigate the public health and humanitarian threat posed by the coronavirus poses to a confined population, Minneapolis-based Precision Kiosk Technologies is highlighting its AB Kiosks, which can be used to replace riskier face-to-face meetings with
-
The former Big Brother reality TV star Matías Schrank was arrested by the Cybercrime division of the Misiones provincial police, after publishing tweets that claimed that Eduardo Rovira, the president of the Misiones legislature, had contracted COVID-19 on his recent trip to Thailand and was
-
The State Disaster Management Authority of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, in collaboration with other government agencies, is developing tools to track the travel history of people who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus and those who are under quarantine at home. The COVID alerting
-
As inmates are released from prison in order to mitigate the public health and humanitarian threat posed by the coronavirus poses to a confined population, Minneapolis-based Precision Kiosk Technologies is highlighting its AB Kiosks, which can be used to replace riskier face-to-face meetings with
-
The regulations brought in to curb the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa included directions published by the minister of communications and digital technologies that critics claimed violated the country's constitution. On the plus side, the regulations ordered service providers to ensure continued
-
As part of Mexico City's March 31 lockdown, which shut all shops except those relating to health, food, and essential services, telephone companies will provide access to cell phone antennas to enable the Digital Agency of Public Innovation to monitor movement and personal contact. The information
-
To help the UK's Department for Work and Pensions handle the more than half a million applications the department received in the last two weeks of March, the identity verification company Nomidio, a subsidiary of Post-Quantum, is offering its service free of charge. The service would enable a
-
The Israeli defense minister, Naftali Bennett, has published a plan under which civilian companies including the controversial company NSO Group would cooperate with the defence establishment to fight the novel coronavirus after a sharp rise in reported cases indicated that existing methods of
-
Biometrics companies are offering free services to essential businesses, remote workforces, and government agencies administering benefits claims during the coronavirus pandemic. Among them are Redrock Biometrics, which is waiving its licence fee for palm print recognition for essential businesses
-
The San Francisco-based big data company Grandata has created a heat map to show which areas of Argentina are best complying with the quarantine lockdown. Grandata used an "anonymised" dataset collected from apps that provide third parties with geolocation information. The heat map shows if an
-
The Hungarian government passed a law on March 30 granting Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule indefinitely by decree, which he said was essential to deal with the coronavirus crisis. The law also contained a provision under which those spreading false information about the pandemic could
-
The Guangzhou Public Transportation Group has installed a biometric tablet next to bus drivers' seats so they can check the temperature and identity of every passenger who boards. The tablets will also photograph each passenger, allowing them to be identified by China's facial recognition network in
-
Learning from countries like South Korea, government of the Indian state Karnataka has assigned its ten-member COVID-19 task force, which includes IAS officers with expertise in the fields of technology, medicine and healthcare, to develop a system to the approximately 40,000 people who visited
-
Filipino officials are subjecting people caught breaking lockdown rules to humiliating and abusive punishments such as locking them in cramped dog cages or forcing them to sit outside in the midday sun, similar to tactics in China, where authorities have been filmed tying violators to pillars and
-
After police in Bellevue, WA were inundated with calls from local residents reporting suspected violations of the state's week-old stay-at-home order, they asked the public to use the MyBellevue app instead, to keep 911 lines open for emergencies. The police added that they have no plans to charge
-
At the end of March, jointly organised by the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s public health body), the German Centre for Infection Research, the Institute for Virology at Berlin’s Charite hospital, and blood donation services, researchers planned to begin conducting blood tests among the general
-
The Armenian National Assembly is considering identifying the contacts of people infected with Covid-19 through cell phone location data. The draft was tabled by the government. If approved, the operators of the public electronic communications networks will be obliged to provide information on
-
Authorities in the Kazakhstan cities of Astana and Almaty will require those ordered to mandatory quarantine to install the Smart Astana app and enable geolocation settings, wifi, and Bluetooth to make it possible to monitor them and ensure they move no more than 30 meters from their designated
-
Tunisian authorities have sent humanly remote-controlled robots onto the streets to enforce the country's lockdown; videos shared on social media show the robots challenging Tunisians in the country's capital to ask if they are aware of the rules and demand where they are going. The robots, known as
-
A Telegram user reports that Uzbekistan authorities are confiscating mobile phones, audio/video equipment, bank cards, and other storage media from those in quarantine, claiming that the move is necessary to limit the spread of fear and disinformation about the virus. Source: https://thediplomat.com
-
Mobile phone users in Pakistan have discovered that the government is accessing, without consent, their mobile phone location and call records despite legal questions about whether doing so violates the country's constitution. After users reported that patients testing positive for COVID-19 returned
-
The Cyprus health minister, Constantinos Ioannou, has imposed a curfew between 9pm and 6am every night from 31 March onwards for all but essential workers, who will have to carry a confirmation form signed by their employer; those who do not comply will be fined €300, double the previous fine
-
The Croatian government intends to enforce individual quarantine orders via a dedicated app, text message alerts, or location data provided by telecommunications companies. However, the government aims to comply with GDPR by targeting only those ordered into self-isolation and only tracking their
-
The Western Australia state police force is using drones to deliver audio warnings to enforce the quarantine restrictions placed on some individuals and sending more than 200 officers to patrol the streets to break up gatherings and enforce social distancing in parks, beaches, and cafe strips. The
-
The Argentinian company Urbetrack is developing a "Cuidate en casa" (Take Care of Yourself at Home) app that it will pitch to government agencies throughout the country. The goal is to contribute to remediating the health crisis by helping enforce quarantine. The plan is that users will download the
-
An official directive from the Pakistani provincial government of Sindh titled "COVID-19 Mobile Registration System for Needy People" describes its use of multiple databases to identify those in need of welfare funds and disburse cash to them by combining taxpayers' data from the Federal Board of
-
With more than 71,000 Serbian citizens returning to the country, primarily from Germany, Austria, Italy, and France, the government has introduced systems to ensure they obey the country's self-isolation rules. The government monitors telephone numbers, especially Italian ones, and pays special
-
The whistleblower said they were unable to find any legitimate reason for the high volume of the requests for location information. “There is no other explanation, no other technical reason to do this. Saudi Arabia is weaponising mobile technologies,” the whistleblower claimed. The data leaked by
-
The computer science department at IIT-Bombay has sent two proposals for mobile applications that can track quarantine violators to a variety of Indian public authorities including officials in the Ministry of Human Resource and Development, the Maharashtra state government, and the Brihanmumbai
-
As part of its efforts to facilitate a transition out of lockdown, researchers at Germany's Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, are planning to introduce "immunity certificates" for those who pass an antibody test to show they have had and recovered from the virus and are ready to re-enter the
-
The Argentinian Ministry of Transport, working with the state-owned satellite company ARSAT and the telecoms regulator,ENACOM, proposed to the Executive on 31 March 2020 a platform that uses cell tower data to track people on public transport and ensure they comply with quarantine laws. By 28 March
-
The World Health Organization will partner with major blockchain and technology companies to launch a distributed ledger-based platform to be dubbed "MiPasa" that it says will facilitate "fully private information sharing between individuals, state authorities, and health institutions" by cross
-
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in conjunction with local and state governments, are using location data collected by the mobile advertising industry from millions of cellphones in order to better understand how Americans are moving during the COVID-19 pandemic and how those
-
The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Transnistria (the Pridnestrovian Moldovian Republic), an autonomous territorial unit of Moldova, has announced it will use facial recognition to identify people who break quarantine. In its press release, MIAT highlighted the case of a 26-year old citizen who was
-
The Jamaican Government intends to fast-track creating and implementing a national ID system and give every Jamaican citizen a unique identifier in order to help it distribute aid and benefits needed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The government intends the system to be similar to others such
-
After the British government announced a national lockdown, Derbyshire Police used drones to capture footage of people rambling, walking their dogs, and taking photos in the Peak District. The move was widely criticised as heavy-handed and counter-productive; however, the government followed up by
-
An Accra High Court has ruled that the National Identification Authority can continue registering Ghanaians after two citizens filed a case arguing that continued registration violates the social distancing directive issued by president Akufo-Addo. However, a different division of the High Court
-
From our partners from the Defenders Coalition: The civil society’s Police Reforms Working Group, comprised of twenty national human rights organisations, condemn the unnecessary and excessive use of force by Kenya Police Service officers yesterday at the Likoni Ferry Crossing, Mombasa. The police
-
Civil Society advocates, including PI, expressed their dissaproval of a letter from the Colombian Data Protection Authority, which was intending to give a blank exception to the government in relation with handling the pandemic. Link (in Spanish): https://web.karisma.org.co/organizaciones-de-la
-
Together with Norwegian company Simula the Norwegian Institute of Public Health is developping a voluntary app to track users geolocation and slow the spread of Covid-19. Running in the background, the app will collect GPS and Bluetooth location data and store them on a server for 30 days. If a user
-
Authorities in Montenegro have published on a government website lists of individuals who are in mandatory self-isolation after returning home from abroad. The lists, structured by municipality, include full name, isolation date, and hometown. The government made the decision to do this after
-
As employees shift to working from home, their employers are buying and installing software to monitor them in their new location. Companies such as InterGuard, Time Doctor, Teramind, VeriClock, innerActiv, ActivTrak, and Hubstaff provide a combination of screen monitoring and productivity metrics
-
The company that makes the Natural Cycles women’s fertility app has added n optional service to allow users to track Covid-19 symptoms as well as positive and negative tests. As part of its fertility service, the app already takes each user’s basal body temperature daily; enabling the additional
-
The Northamptonshire Police reported a surge in calls from people reporting their neighbours for exercising more than once a day, holding barbecues in their back yards, or failing to cough into a tissue. Nick Adderley said his officers will issue penalty notices if necessary, but thought it
-
The UK's Home Office has granted police in England new powers to enforce lockdown rules for six months, to be reviewed every three weeks. The police can now: order people to disperse or leave an area; ensure parents are doing all they can to top their children from breaking the rules; issue a £60
-
On the second day of India's nationwide shutdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Karnataka government published the home addresses of quarantined residents, as a deterrent to breaking the rules. The list included individuals who had flown in from a foreign country and been asked to stay indoors
-
The consumer and market trends insight company StatSocial announced Crisis Insights, which it claims tracks rapidly changing consumer audience dynamics to help US brands and CMOs respond effectively to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic and economic slowdown. StatSocial's Silhouette social data
-
Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Informatics/KOMINFO official website) On Thursday, 26 March 2020, the Indonesian Minister of Communication and Informatics, Johnny G. Plate, issued the Ministerial Decree No. 159/2000 to facilitate the cooperation between the Government and telecommunication
-
Bulgarian police forces have been authorised to request and obtain metadata from citizens' private communications from telephone and Internet operators. The powers are reportedly to be used to monitor those under compulsory quarantine, and will allow police to track their movement as well as
-
In a widely circulated animated heat map, the geospatial visualisation company Tectonix GEO in partnership with the location technology company X-Mode used the secondary locations of anonymised mobile devices that were active on a single beach in in Ft Lauderdale, FL during spring break to show how
-
The UK's National Health Service is collaborating with Palantir to launch a data platform that will track the movement of critical staff and materials; it will, for the first time, give ministers a dashboard showing the first-ever comprehensive view of the entire health care system. The data
-
The free app Testeate, developed by the company Adrómeda in collaboration with the Association of Information and Communication Technologies of Mar del Plata (ATICMA) and the Chamber of Software and Computer Services Companies of Argentina (CESSI) and launched in the Municipality of General
-
8 europeans telecoms providers (Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange,Telefonica, Telecom Italia , Telenor, Telia and A1 Telekom Austria) have agreed to share mobile phone location data with the European Commission to track the spread of the coronavirus. The Commission said it would use anonymsed data
-
On March 24 the German Bundestag passed a comprehensive amendment to the Infection Protection Act that authorises the Federal Ministry of Health to implement measures for medical care without the consent of the Federal Council. These include the ability to impose curfews and travel restrictions
-
South Africa's Communications Minister, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, has stated that telecommunications operators in the country have agreed to provide location data to identify how many people have been infected in a particular area. The Government has broad powers under a national state of disaster
-
A newly-enacted Slovakian law, inspired by similar laws in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, allows the country's Public Health Office to use location data from mobile phones to track people ordered to quarantine to ensure they are not breaking the rules. The angry public response on privacy
-
According to information collected by Le Temps, telco Swisscom will use SIM card geolocation data to communicate to federal authorities when more than 20 phones are detected in an 100 square meters area. Gathering of more than 5 people are forbidden in Switzerland since March 21. Data collected by
-
A web form to screen COVID-19 cases developed by the Mexico City government collects a wide range of personal information such as name, age, telephone number, home address, social network username, and cellphone number. The privacy notice establishes that such data may be transferred to a vast array
-
Israel intends to deploy a cellphone tracking system developed in Taiwan by Chunghwa Telecom, which launched it on February 1 in Taiwan, where it was used to track the subscribers of Taiwan's five network operators. To begin, Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control compiled a list of people who need to
-
The European Commission urged Europe's telecoms giants, including Deutsche Telekom and Orange, to share their users' mobile data streams from across the region to help predict the spread of the coronavirus "for the common good". In a letter in response, Dutch Renew MEP Sophie In't Veld stressed that
-
The Ministry of Administration and Local Self-Government of the Republic of Srpska, an entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, published the full and hometowns of the first 30 people who broke quarantine on March 23. The move was condemned by the Initiative for Monitoring the European Integration of
-
To contain the coronavirus, Vietnam focused on aggressive contact tracing, forced quarantines for all people arriving in the country, cancelling all foreign flights, conscripting medical students and retired doctors and nurses, instituting surveillance, and mobilising medical and military personnel
-
After Pakistani residents queried whether messages labelled "CoronaALERT" sent out via SMS were legitimate, telecom authorities confirmed that it was authentic, being sent to selected individuals at the request of the Ministry of Health under the Digital Parkistan programme. Individuals were chosen
-
A day after John Tory, the mayor of the City of Toronto, told thousands of attendees at an online event hosted by TechTO that the city was gathering cellphone location data from telecoms in order to identify areas where residents were still congregating despite the city's social distancing rules, he
-
A 13-year-old girl who travelled into Hong Kong from New York and was ordered to quarantine and issued with a wristband was spotted dining with her uncle in a Japanese restaurant by another diner, who video recorded her and posted the clip to social media, where it went viral. She and several others
-
The Israeli Ministry of Health's mobile app, "The Shield", is intended to alert users if they have been at a location in Israel at the same time as a known COVID-19 patient. The app, which is available for both Android and iOS, works by collecting the GPS and WiFi network (SSID) information of a
-
Estonia's Government Crisis Commission has instructed the state statistical office, Statistics Estonia, to use mobile geolocation data from companies such as Telia, Elisa, and Tele 2 in order to study people's movements to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Statistics Estonia hoped to launch the
-
The success of South Korea's efforts to combat the coronavirus without a national lockdown and without suspending civil rights depended in part on preparation put in place after the 2015 MERS epidemic and in part on the country's network of private testing labs, which enabled the country to quickly
-
Managed from a purpose-built coronavirus control centre, Moscow's network of 100,000 cameras equipped with facial recognition technology is being used to ensure that anyone placed under quarantine stays off the streets. Officials claim the centre can also be used to track international arrivals and
-
In Jojutla, a municipality in the southern state of Morelos, the government is using drones, normally used for security tasks such as reducing homicides, to surveille gatherings in public parks and plazas and tell people to go home, at the same time distributing hand sanitiser gel and face masks on
-
A BBC article captures the story of a student living in Taiwan under quarantine, who reports that when his battery on his phone ran out, within an hour four different local administrative units contacted him; and a patrol was dispatched to verify his location; and a text was sent that the government
-
Researchers at Germany's Robert Koch Institute and Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute are working on an app that uses Bluetooth connections between smartphones and is compliant with GDPR to anonymously save the distance and duration of contact between people on the smartphone to make it possible to
-
In a partnership with G3 Global Berhad, a system combining thermal scanning technology and facial recognition from SenseTime has been put in place at Malaysia's King's Palace. The combination is intended to trigger alerts, as well as detect and identify people even when they're wearing face masks in
-
The Guatemalan government is using the app Alerta Guate to spread public health information, which was created by the Chicago-registered company In-telligent LLC. The app is allowed to collect each user's email address, social media account handles, age, personal interests, and geographic location
-
After police officers in Paraguay posted videos of themselves punishing people who have been caught breaking quarantine on social media, Paraguayans expressed outrage over their actions. The punishments seen in the videos, which were recorded and shared by the officers themselves, include
-
When the phone belonging to an American University student in Taiwan, who was subject to 14 days' quarantine after returning from Europe, ran out of battery power, in less than hour he had received phone calls from four different local administrative units, a text message notifying him he would be
-
Our partners from Internet Lab in Brazil started a series of podcasts to discuss the impacts of COVID-19 in the country. They are all recorded and available in the website (in Portuguese). Link: https://www.internetlab.org.br/pt/noticias/antivirus-um-programa-para-discutir-a-tecnologia-direitos-e-a
-
Norway's state research and development company, Simula Research Laboratory, in collaboration with the Institute of Public Health, is working to develop technical solutions to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Code discovered on Github and later removed included examples of how the researchers
-
On March 23, Argentina's immigration agency, Dirección Nacional de Migraciones (DNM), announced that anyone arriving in the country would be required to install the free COVID-19 Ministry of Health app on their phone for 14 days to ensure they comply with quarantine rules in order to protect the
-
An Excel file containing complete data pertaining to patients tested for coronavirus in the cities Quetta and Taftan in the the Balochistan region of Pakistan has been circulating in WhatsApp groups about Balochistan. The file contains information such as names, phone numbers, age address and other
-
The Rio de Janeiro City Hall has signed an agreement with telecomunications company TIM to use geolocation data to develop "heat maps" by cross-referencing epidemological hubs with high population density locations. Under the agreement, TIM will pinpoint the movement of its users across Rio de
-
Under a new protocol, international passengers arriving at Lime's Jorge Chavez International Airport or by ship at Callao Port, is referred to medical staff if they are arriving from places with confirmed cases, even if they are asymptomatic. Passengers who show symptoms in transit are transferred
-
Malaysia will use both government-owned drones and drones borrowed from local industries under the direction of the armed forces and on-the-ground police to monitor compliance with the Movement Control Order. Because Malaysia doesn't have enough drones to cover the whole country, they will be
-
The Local Government Association has argued that councils should not have to comply with freedom of information requests during the coronavirus crisis. Greater Manchester police followed suit, saying that police in non-critical roles were being reallocated to operational policing and would not
-
Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin has ordered the country's Communications Ministry to develop a system, to be built on analysing specific individuals' geolocation data from telecommunications companies that can track people who have come into contact with those who have tested positive for
-
The Uganda Communications Commission announced on March 22 that it would crack down on people spreading fake videos and misinformation about the novel coronavirus through social media, noting that this behaviour is illegal under the Computer Misuse Act, the Data Protection and Privacy Act, and other
-
The Dutch coronavirus containment measures introduced on March 23 were in line with many other countries: gatherings banned until June 1 except for funerals and weddings; social distancing; personal services such as nail bars and hairdressers shut down; schools, gyms, fitness centres, and sports
-
Argentina's Public Prosecutor's Office will start installing an app on the smartphones of those who violate government-ordered quarantine in the cities of Santa Fé and Rosario. The app will be installed by the province's Criminal Investigation Agency to track those who are under criminal
-
The Indian medical AI start-up Qure.ai has released qScout, an AI-powered "virtual care platform". Intended to help governments, hospitals, and clinics, the qScout app is meant to identify high-risk individuals, assist with contact tracing, facilitate remote triage, read chest X-rays to identify
-
Because tracking and limiting the movement of those suspected to be carrying COVID-19 carriers has been a factor in flattening the exponential curve of cases in places like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, Professor Marylouise McLaws, a technical advisor to the WHO's Infection Prevention and
-
On March 9, SK Telecom began providing South Korea's Gyeongbuk Provincial Police Agency with its Geovision population analysis service and GIRAF platform. The company claims that the combination can analyse mobile geolocation data across the country in real time, create visualisations, and show how
-
Owing to concerns about the possibility of spreading the coronavirus via banknotes and payment cards, Russia has begun testing its Unified Biometric System (EBS) for payments at a selection of grocery stores including Lenta supermarkets. The Russian bank VTB plans a mass roll-out for mid-2020. For
-
After Asian countries used mass surveillance of smartphones to trace contacts and halt the spread of the coronavirus, Western countries such as the UK and Germany are trying to find less-invasive ways to use phones to collect and share data about infections that would work within data privacy laws
-
The Greek government issued a ban on all unnecessary traffic from March 23 to April 6 in order to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Anyone moving around under one of the list of exceptions must carry a police identity card or passport and a certificate of movement, which citizens obtain by filling
-
Technology such as Hong Kong's electronic monitoring bracelets, used to ensure that people do not break their mandated quarantine, may appear reasonable during a pandemic, but could be problematic if deployed widely and used to identify those who have joined anti-government protests. The same
-
Albania deployed the army for a planned 40 hours to enforce a curfew that the country initiated on March 21 to control the spread of COVID-19 after citizens continued to openly ignore the orders to stay at home. Although the country had only 76 confirmed cases at the time, it was concerned about the
-
The Hungarian government is seeking to extend indefinitely the state of emergency it has declared because of the coronavirus epidemic. The extension, which was debated in the Hungarian parliament on March 23, would allow the government to rule by decree without parliamentary approval for as long as
-
The self-testing web app issued by Argentina's Secretariat of Public Innovation asks for national ID number, email and phone as mandatory fields in order to submit the test. The Android version requires numerous permissions: calendar, contacts, geolocation data (both network-based and GPS)
-
The US Department of Justice has asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies as one of a number of new powers the department is seeking during the coronavirus crisis. The DoJ also wants Congress to pause the statute of limitations
-
The global pandemic that has been declared by COVID-19 is already affecting countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Recognizing the seriousness of this health crisis and the legal possibility for governments to take exceptional measures to control the pandemic, it is essential to remember that
-
To counter the many rumours, fake news, and hoaxes spreading in Myanmar, the country's Ministry of Health and Sports launched a website in collaboration with state and regional governments with videos about the virus, the latest data, and updates on the latest number of cases and lab results in
-
The new Singaporean app, TraceTogether, developed by the Government Technology Agency in collaboration with the Ministry of Health was launched on March 20 after eight weeks of development. The app, which can be downloaded by anyone with a Singapore mobile number and a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone
-
India has begun stamping the hands of people arriving at airports in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka to specify the date until which they must remain in quarantine. The government is also using airline and railway reservation data to track suspected infections and find hand-stamped people
-
On March 20, the Peruvian government introduced a website where citizens can retrieve the results of tests for COVID-19. The site asks only for the patient to fill in their National ID number and a simple captcha, making it easy for unauthorised parties to access others' results and put people at
-
Among the Chinese companies making efforts to help the country respond to the coronavirus are the technology giants Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, Xiaomi, and Foxconn. In order to fight misinformation, Baidu created a map layer on top of its standard Map App that shows real-time locations of
-
As governments look into surveillance, geolocation and biometric facial recognition to contain the coronavirus, even if they violate user data privacy, the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is allegedly negotiating a partnership with state agencies to monitor infected people and
-
The Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, one of two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina, is introducing fines of €500 to €1,500 (individuals) or €3,000 to €9,000 for spreading "panic and disorder" by publishing false news about the coronavirus outbreak in the media and on social networks
-
Hakob Arshakyan, Armenia's minister of the high technology industry, has convened a research group comprising experts in IT and AI has been convened to collect and analyse data on the spread of coronavirus, compare it with the data collected by international partners, and develop forecasts. The
-
UK: O2 shares aggregated location data with government to test compliance with distancing guidelines
Mobile network operator O2 is providing aggregated data to the UK government to analyse anonymous smartphone location data in order to show people are following the country's social distancing guidelines, particularly in London, which to date accounts for about 40% of the UK's confirmed cases and 30 -
The Polish government has developed the free Home Quarantine app for both iPhone and Android, which allows the police to check that individuals do not break quarantine; those who do may be fined up to PLN 5,000 and also offers support to those who are quarantined. Once users activate the app by
-
BT, owner of UK mobile operator EE, is in talks with the government about using its phone location and usage data to monitor whether coronavirus limitation measures such as asking the public to stay at home are working. The information EE supplies would be delayed by 12 to 24 hours, and would
-
The Chinese Communist Party has worked to control the narrative and deflect blame during the coronavirus crisis by drawing on its state and CCP-owned media to disseminate content via its English-language Facebook pages and Twitter feed (even though these platforms are banned in China). China has
-
Four members of the Council of Europe - Romania, Latvia, Moldova, and Armenia - have activated Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows derogations in cases of public emergency. Derogation allows Member States to take measures to the extent required by the situation as
-
Four members of the Council of Europe - Romania, Latvia, Moldova, and Armenia - have activated Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows derogations in cases of public emergency. Derogation allows Member States to take measures to the extent required by the situation as
-
Four members of the Council of Europe - Romania, Latvia, Moldova, and Armenia - have activated Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows derogations in cases of public emergency. Derogation allows Member States to take measures to the extent required by the situation as
-
Facebook's scientists are analysing location data about compliance with social distancing recommendations in various countries using information from a private vault of location information its apps have collected. The analysis shows that only "very modest" changes in habits in the US, France, and
-
Researchers at the University of Oxford are working with the UK government on an app similar to the smartphone tracking system China developed to alert people who have come in contact with someone infected with the coronavirus. The British app, which would be associated with the country's National
-
As governments look into surveillance, geolocation and biometric facial recognition to contain the coronavirus, even if they violate user data privacy, the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is allegedly negotiating a partnership with state agencies to monitor infected people and
-
Four members of the Council of Europe - Romania, Latvia, Moldova, and Armenia - have activated Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which allows derogations in cases of public emergency. Derogation allows Member States to take measures to the extent required by the situation as
-
The Mumbai police have been asked by the civic governing body to track the movements of people arriving at Mumbai airport through the GPS location of their phones. Arrivals at the airport in Mumbai are also being stamped with “Proud to protect Mumbaikars. Home quarantined” with the date until which
-
In response to a case brought by the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah), the Arab Joint List, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a temporary injunction on March 19 limiting the the state's and the Shin Bet security service's use of
-
On March 19, the Peruvian government instituted a daily curfew from 8pm to 5am, which applies to all but those working to provide essential services. Members of the print and broadcast press must carry their special permits, badges, and ID cards, and those requiring urgent medical care are allowed
-
Our partners from IPANDETEC in Panamá wrote about privacy and personal data in the context of the COVID-19 response, stating that throughout Central America, data protection laws and patient privacy lean towards respecting their privacy before the scientific interest of their cases. Link: https:/
-
In emergency legislation, the government of Norway proposed to exempt itself from current laws other than the Constitution and human rights so that it could issue new rules and regulations without needing Parliamentary debate even if they conflict with other laws. MPs may intervene if a third of
-
The identities of Montenegro's first two confirmed COVID-19 patients were published by social media users, including photos of one of the patients and her family, leading to online abuse based on their ethnicity and religious beliefs. Source: https://balkaninsight.com/2020/03/18/montenegrin
-
After Singapore’s Ministry of Health made information about victims public, and a developer turned the information into an interactive map. The map was discontinued on March 18 because the volume of cases had outstripped the developer's limits. Source: https://sgwuhan.xose.net/
-
The Romanian government has formally notified the Council of Europe under Article 15, paragraph 3 of the ECHR of the country's state of emergency decree, noting that some of the measures being taken involve derogations from the obligations under the Convention. Source: https://rm.coe.int
-
Hong Kong is issuing electronic tracker wristbands to people under compulsory home quarantine to ensure they do not go out. The wristbands are accompanied by a mandatory smartphone app that shares their location with the government via messaging platforms such as WeChat and WhatsApp. Upon arriving
-
The CovPY Auto Reporte project is an auto-reporting system created by Penguin Academy in the hope of smoothing the peak impact of the pandemic on the Paraguayan health system. It allows anyone to access it and report their symptoms and get quick feedback what steps to take next as well as generate
-
Kinsa Health, which has sold or given away more than 1 million internet-connected thermometers to household covering 2 million people, finds that the maps it creates showing the difference between expected (based on years of data the company has collected) and reported levels of fever may act as an
-
Technology entrepreneurs within Belgium would like to introduce a health code app similar to China's Alipay Health Code that would control individuals' movements based on their health status. The government has engaged privacy experts from the Belgian data protection authority and Ghent University
-
In a statement, Vodafone said it is "producing an aggregated and anonymous heat map for the Lombardy region in Italy to help the authorities to better understand population movements in order to help thwart the spread of COVID-19." The company offered to help governments develop insights based on
-
China: Manufacturer Telepower adds fever detection and facial recognition to point-of-sale terminals
According to a company announcement, Telepower Communication (Telpo), a leading Chinese manufacturer of smart point-of-sale systems and intelligent hardware, has integrated into its terminals new features to support a wide variety of contactless use cases. The company’s family of terminals for -
Using mobile phone data to verify the movements of their owners, the Italian region of Lombardy found that between February 20, when the first COVID-19 case was discovered, and March 10, movement by its 2 million inhabitants dropped by just under 60%. Lombardy has also used cell phone data, obtained
-
Using mobile phone data to verify the movements of their owners, the Italian region of Lombardy found that between February 20, when the first COVID-19 case was discovered, and March 10, movement by its 2 million inhabitants dropped by just under 60%. Lombardy has also used cell phone data, obtained
-
The US Department of Health and Human Services has announced it will waive penalties for violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects patient data privacy. HHS argued that in the nationwide emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, greater latitude is needed
-
The coronavirus action plan announced on March 3, alongside many measures for managing the NHS in the crisis, will also allow the Investigatory Powers Commissioner to appoint judicial commissioners (JCs) on a temporary basis in the event that there are insufficient JCs available to operate the
-
Athena Security, which previously sold a system claiming to detect weapons in video feeds, is marketing "artificially intelligent thermal cameras" that the company claims can detect fevers and send an alert to the client that they may be carrying the coronavirus, and claims that its Fever Detection
-
The Israeli compnay NSO Group, best known for the spyware it sells governments and has been used to target journalists and advocates, says it has developed a product aimed at analysing data to map people’s movements to identify who they’ve come in contact with, which can then be used to stop the
-
The Austrian telecom operator A1 has voluntarily provided the government with "anonymized" location data of its customers for the first two Saturdays in March. The data shows that citizens have significantly reduced their social contacts. After critics expressed privacy concerns, the company issued
-
The German mobile operator Deutsche Telekom announced in a press conference on RKI Live that it had passed on, anonymised, its users' movement data to the Robert-Koch Institute to study the extent to which the population would follow the government's restrictions. RKI president Lothar Wieler said
-
The Paraguayan Minister of Defense, Bernardino Soto Estigarribia, announced that from March 17 onward restrictions on movement and crowds would be enforced by the military along with the police forces. The minister said it should not be thought of as a violation of human rights because the military
-
Thailand's National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission (NBTC) provided a SIM card to every foreigner and Thai who had travelled from countries that have have been designated as "high risk" for COVID-19 infections (at the time, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Italy, and Macau). According to
-
Ministers have permitted the Shin Bet security service to "use the cellular phone data of carriers of the disease to retrace their steps and identify anyone they may have infected", and will relay the information to the Health Ministry, which will send a message to those who were within two meters
-
A task force at the Italian Ministry of Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Pavia to leverage big data technologies to deal with COVID-19, after the WHO advised governments that lockdowns alone are not enough, and that testing, isolation, and contact tracing are crucial. The effort
-
A task force at the Italian Ministry of Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Pavia to leverage big data technologies to deal with COVID-19, after the WHO advised governments that lockdowns alone are not enough, and that testing, isolation, and contact tracing are crucial. The effort
-
Metrolinx, the public transport agency for the Canadian province of Ontario says that, on request, it gave Toronto Public Health contact information associated with registered Presto payment cards used on specific trips, after a 40-year-old man was diagnosed with coronavirus (COVID-19). The agency
-
On March 17, after declaring a state of emergency an ordering everyone to stay at home, the Peruvian government began requiring a special authorisation for street travel. Workers in a the categories specified in Article 4 of the Supreme Decree must obtain the authorisation via a government website
-
Russia has set up a coronavirus information centre to to monitor social media for misinformation about the coronavirus and spot empty supermarket shelves using a combination of surveillance cameras and AI. The centre also has a database of contacts and places of work for 95% of those under mandatory
-
Aided by its small size, Singapore's contact tracing efforts were a key element of controlling the virus's spread; detectives used CCTV footage to locate the contacts of more than 6,000 people. Singapore also contacts individuals required to self-isolate several times a day and requires them to send
-
The Ecuadorian government has authorised tracking mobile phones via GPS satellite to ensure that citizens do not break mandatory quarantine after six violators were identified. Source: https://www.ecuadortv.ec/noticias/covid-19/romo-vigilancia-epidemiologico-covid19-? Writer: Ecuador TV Publication
-
Taiwan, linked by direct flights to Wuhan, moved to contain the virus as soon as reports of the Wuhan outbreak emerged. At the end of January, it suspended flights from China, and integrated its national health database with its immigration and customs information in order to trace potential cases
-
At the MIT Media lab, Ramesh Raskar is leading a team that includes software engineers at companies such as Facebook and Uber to develop the free and open source app Private Kit: Safe Paths. The app is intended to share encrypted information between phones in the network without going through a
-
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has authorised the country's internal security agency to use a previously secret tranche of mobile phone geolocation data, gathered to combat terrorism, to retrace the movements of individuals with confirmed cases of the coronavirus and identify people
-
The presidential decree declaring a health emergency in Paraguay empowers the Ministry of Public Health to order "general preventive isolation" from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m, with exceptions for those doing vital work such as delivering food or transportation. The Ministry of the Interior and its
-
Spanish police are using drones to warn people to stay indoors apart from necessary trips after seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases. Human officers control the drones and relay via radio warnings to people to leave public parks and return home. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/spanish-police
-
Three years ago, the Alphabet subsidiary Verily developed a software platform, Project Baseline, to run clinical trials on a group of volunteers who agree to share their medical data with a group of researchers at pharmaceutical companies and research hospitals. In early March, Verily began
-
The Indonesian Doctors Association has asked the government to open up the identity of patients who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus in order to facilitate contact tracing and improve the efficiency of efforts to prevent further spread, arguing that in an emergency like this the public
-
Peru has suspended constitutional rights such as freedom of movement and assembly, although the government has guaranteed the operation of supermarkets, pharmacies, banks, basic services, and the transportation of merchandise. Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-latam
-
US government agencies are considering a range of tracking and surveillance technologies as part of efforts to control the spread of the novel coronavirus. These include: geolocation tracking and facial recognition systems to analyse photos, both to enable contact tracing. Palantir is working with
-
Our partners from the Foundation for Media Alternatives in Philippines reported different ways in which the COVID-19 is impacting public health and privacy rights. Link: https://www.fma.ph/2020/03/15/public-health-and-privacy-amid-covid-19-the-fma-digital-rights-report/
-
Among the emergency measures announced by Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic, the military will guard hospitals and police will monitor those in quarantine or self-isolation for 14 or 28 days, who could face jail terms of up to three years for violating the rules. Source: https://www.reuters.com
-
On Wednesday, the government of Madrid will launch a free app to track COVID-19 cases similar to those developed in Asian countries such as South Korea, China, and Taiwan. The development is being carried out at no charge by developers from Google, Telefónica, Ferrovial, Goggo Network, Carto
-
The Thai Tech Startup Association, Department of Disease Control (Ministry of Public Health), Digital Economy Promotion Agency (Ministry of Digital Economy and Society), and National Innovation Agency have developed a questionnaire on an app which as adverised on the Thai Tech Startup Associaiton
-
On March 14, the Peruvian government set up a website for individuals to check their symptoms so they can be directed towards sources of help. The web form asks for ID number, phone, email and home address. Source: https://www.gob.pe/coronavirus Writer: Peruvian government Publication: Peruvian
-
On March 14, Romanian president Klaus Iohannis announced a state of emergency to make it possible to allocate new resources for crisis management, and urged the public to follow isolation guidelines and hygiene rules. The Parliament must approve within five days, and the state of emergency lasts 30
-
On March 14 a group of immigrant advocacy groups wrote to the government asking for the Home Office to release all 1,500 to 2,000 detainees in order to protect them from a coronavirus outbreak in the UK's seven removal centres and two short-term holding centres.. On March 21, the Home Office said it
-
Our partners from Digital Rights Foundation in Pakistan wrote a piece analysing cases of privacy violations, misinformation, hate speech and other cases. As they said, the situation with regards to the Coronavirus is still developing in the country and Digital Rights Foundation, are keeping an eye
-
The Belgian Minister of Public Health has approved a programme under which telephone companies Proximus and Telenet will transfer some of their their data to the private third-party company Dalberg Data Insights in order to help combat the coronavirus epidemic; Orange has also agreed "in principle"
-
Taiwan's response to the coronavirus has kept the country's level of cases extremely low. Building on its experience from the 2003 SARS outbreak, the country immediately responded when the first news of the outbreak in China appeared with numerous measures that leveraged its national insurance data
-
Frisco, TX-based MTX Group is collaborating with the New York State Department of Health in deploying a coronavirus-monitoring and messaging system enabling New York State to monitor travellers, physicians, and others who come into close contact with anyone with symptoms. The application asks users
-
A Hamburg geotracking startup called Ubilabs is working with the Hannover School of Medicine on a data analysis platform that could track people who have tested positive for the coronavirus and their contacts, Der Tagesspiegel reported on Tuesday; this type of tracking would require individuals'
-
A review of European privacy laws considers whether the tracking and monitoring methods China used to shut down the COVID-19 epidemic are in compliance with GDPR. The French data protection authority CNIL says employers are not allowed to take mandatory temperature readings from employees or
-
Technology companies are struggling to cope with the flood of misinformation spreading across the internet, both on social media sites and on the open web, where 4,000 new websites have been created since the beginning of the year that include "coronavirus" in their title and 3% of which are
-
After the Iranian government produced the AC19 Android app, intended to help people self-diagnose rather than going to a hospital, Google pulled it from the Play Store apparently suspecting that the app made the misleading claim that it could detect COVID-19 infections although it is also true that
-
Colombia's has launched the free, Android-only, prevention-focused Colombia-Coronapp developed by the National Health Institute (INS) to help identify and eradicate the virus across the country, as well provide centralisation and transparency. Besides their basic information, users are asked to say
-
Although the alerts about contacts with people infected by the coronavirus sent out via SMS by the South Korean government do not include names, the information included about people who tested positive for coronavirus, and their past locations can be revealingly detailed in some cases. Those who
-
With 6,300 COVID-19 cases and more than 40 reported deaths, the South Korean government launched a smarphone app (Android first, iPhone due on March 20) to monitor citizens on lockdown as part of its "maximum" action to contain the outbreak. The app keeps patients in touch with care workers and uses
-
The "safety guidance texts" sent by health authorities and district offices in South Korea are causing information overload and have included embarrassing revelations about infected people's private lives. A text may include, for example, a link to trace the movements of people who have recently
-
Despite warnings that airport screening will only delay but not stop disease outbreaks, in early March US vice-president Mike Pence pledged "100% screening" on direct flights from Italy and South Korea to the United States. Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/why-airport-screening-wont
-
China's airport screening, which includes scanning all arriving passengers for fever using “noncontact thermal imaging” since late January and requiring passengers to report their health status on arrival, look reassuring but won't stop the spread of the novel coronavirus because experience with
-
In a rare departure from personalisation, Facebook announced that it had begun inserting a box into its news feed directing users to the Centers for Disease Control’s page about COVID-19, potentially driving many millions of users to reliable information from an authoritative source. Facebook also
-
WhatsApp is being flooded with fake cures, false information about how the illness is transmitted, and coronavirus conspiracy theories, and has become a vector for spreading panic and misinformation around the world, particularly in countries such as Nigeria, Singapore, Brazil, Pakistan, and Ireland
-
Twitter announced that searching for COVID-19 will take you to a page featuring recent stories from public health organizations and credible mainstream news sources. The search takes common misspellings into account. The company also said it would take a zero-tolerance approach to platform
-
The first two confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Indonesia and their neighbours became the targets of media coverage and social media abuse after their personal details were spread via WhatsApp and other social media soon after the President announced the positive tests results - before anyone told the
-
Under a five-year $20.7 million contract, the US state of Utah is allowing the AI company Banjo real time access to numerous sources of state-owned camera and location data, among other types and combine it with information collected from social media, satellites, and other apps in order to use its
-
An Argentinian crowdsourcing website is collecting information on flights with passengers who were reported as testing positive for COVID-19. Users are asked to enter their email address and the date, airline, and flight number, and tick a box to indicate that someone on their flight was infected
-
A group of independent developers in Argentina started CoTrack, a public crowdsourced effort to develop an app to track and slow the spread of the virus. CoTrack registers each user's geographic movements and looks for times when they are close to people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19. When
-
Software on smartphones dictates whether an individual should be quarantined. Chinese citizens in 200 cities, beginning with Hangzhou, are required to install the Alipay Health Code app, developed by Hangzhou's local government with the help of Alipay owner Ant Financial, on their smartphones. After
-
Software on smartphones dictates whether an individual should be quarantined. Chinese citizens in 200 cities, beginning with Hangzhou, are required to install the Alipay Health Code app, developed by Hangzhou's local government with the help of Alipay owner Ant Financial, on their smartphones. After
-
A document awaiting approval from the federal authorities outlines the measures Russia may need to adopt in the event of a widespread COVID-19 outbreak. In "emergency mode". The proposal's Plan A allows for cancelling all international sports, cultural, scientific, and social events in Moscow
-
Facebook announced on its blog that it was providing researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan with aggregated and anonymised mobility data and high resolution population density maps to help inform their forecasting models for the spread
-
Facebook is providing researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan "aggregated and anonymized" mobility data and high resolution population density maps to help inform their forecasting models for the spread of the virus as part of our
-
A new surveillance system to detect cases of COVID-19 in England was established by Public Health England (PHE) and the NHS to strengthen existing systems and to prepare for and prevent wider transmission of the virus. Some NHS hospitals have been asked to take part in the plan, which involves
-
Russian authorities are using surveillance cameras, facial recognition systems, and geolocation to enforce a two-week quarantine regime affecting 2,500 people. Chinese citizens are banned from entering Russia; Russians and citizens of other countries who arrive from China are required to go through
-
The Hong Kong Department of Health has asked the police to deploy its computerised Major Incident Investigation and Disaster Support System in order to trace the contacts of patients infected by the novel coronavirus. The request for the system, which was used during the SARS epidemic in 2003, came
-
The Trump re-election campaign reportedly purchased advertising space on the Youtube homepage for early November, ensuring that Trump-affiliated political ads will be featured prominently on the platform prior to Election Day on November 3rd. Ads on the Youtube masthead (as the video on top of the
-
In mid-February the Federal Register published new CDC rules, which came into interim effect on February 7, under which airlines are required to collect the name and contact information of all passengers and crew arriving in the United States on international flights, and to transmit this
-
A phone-tracking system used by SAPOL for criminal investigations was used to better understand where a coronavirus-infected 60-year-old couple, who had travelled from Wuhan to visit relatives, roamed in Adelaide in order to identify people who might have been exposed, according to the South
-
On November 3rd, 2019, [...] a critical vulnerability affecting the Android Bluetooth subsystem [was reported]. This vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2020-0022 and was now patched in the latest security patch from February 2020. The security impact is as follows: On Android 8.0 to 9.0, a remote
-
The UK exams regulator, Ofqual, awarded a £46,000 contract for less than a month’s work providing “urgent communications support” to the small research agency Public First, which is owned by James Frayne, a close associate of prime ministerial special advisor Dominic Cummings, and Rachel Wolf, a
-
After 195 US citizens were repatriated from Wuhan, China in January they were placed in quarantine without warning in a cordoned-off section of the Air Force Research Base in California's Mojave Desert. The legal position of this and other similar quarantines is unclear, as the Centers for Disease
-
The Norwegian Consumer Council ( Forbrukerrådet) and noyb filed three formal complaints against Grindr and ad tech companies that were receiving personal data through the app: Twitter’s MoPub, AT&T’s AppNexus, OpenX, AdColony and Smaato. The complaint followed an investigation carried out by the
-
Recent study shows that Americans are wary of data from smart speakers being used in criminal investigations, the Pew Research Center reported. A recent study showed that 49% of Americans answered that it is unacceptable for smart speakers companies to share audio recordings of their customers with
-
An engineering and computer science professor and his team from The Ohio State University discovered a design flaw in low-powered Bluetooth devices that leaves them susceptible to hacking. Zhiqiang Lin, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the university, found the commonly
-
The Focus1, or FuSi, from the US-based startup BrainCo, claims to measure how closely students are paying attention via electrodes that detect brain activity and send the data to teachers’ computers or a mobile app. Lights on the headband glow red, yellow, or blue to signify the level of engagement
-
A woman was killed by a spear to the chest at her home in Hallandale Beache, Florida, north of Miami, in July. Witness "Alexa" has been called yet another time to give evidence and solve the mystery. The police is hoping that the smart assistance Amazon Echo, known as Alexa, was accidentally
-
During 2019, Hong Kong law enforcement authorities had access to AI facial recognition software provided by Sydney-based iOmniscient that can match faces and licence plates from video footage to police databases, but chief executive Carrie Lam's administration and police did not confirm whether they
-
As police began treating every 2019 Hong Kong protest as an illegal assembly attracting sentences of up to ten years in jail, facial recognition offered increased risk of being on the streets, as protesters could be identified and arrested later even if they were in too large a crowd to be picked up
-
In 2019, interviews with Hong Kong protesters destroying smart lampposts revealed that many distrusted the government's claim that they would only take air quality measurements and help with traffic control, largely because of the comprehensive surveillance net the Chinese government was using to
-
Rewire.News has reported that Google apparently remains unwilling to differentiate its Maps search results between clinics in the US that offer abortion care and faith-based organisations that do not provide abortion care. Rewire.News reports that, in contrast Yelp "made a concerted effort" to
-
Ahead of the Irish referendum to amend the Constitutions of Ireland to allow the parliament to legislative for abortion which took place in May 2018, Google decided to stop all advertising relating to the referendum on all of its advertising platforms, including AdWords and YouTube. This followed
-
Bethany Christian Services, an international pregnancy support and adoption agency, is launching a programme with Copley Advertising to send targeted ads to individuals visiting Planned Parenthood clinics, abortion clinics, methadone clinics and high-risk areas (AHPA). The targeting will be done
-
Denmark released 32 prisoners as part of an ongoing review of 10,700 criminal cases, after serious questions arose regarding the reliability of geolocation data obtained from mobile phone operators. Among the various problems with the software used to convert the phone data into usable evidence, it
-
In 2019 Hong Kong protesters cut down 20 of the city's smart lampposts, which are streetlights equipped with sensors and cameras, in order to counter the threat that they were vectors for surveillance technologies such as facial and licence plate recognition. TickTack Technology, which provided the
-
The Lumi by Pampers nappies will track a child's urine (not bowel movements) and comes with an app that helps you "Track just about everything". The activity sensor that is placed on the nappy also tracks a baby's sleep. Concerns over security and privacy have been raised, given baby monitors can be
-
US campaigners supported by the Catholic church are promoting the app Femm, which collects sensitive data about women's sexual lives and aim to scare women from using hormonal birth control, in rural Nigeria. Femm received a $100,000 from the Papal Foundation to promote their app. https://www
-
A coalition of 33 civil rights, disabilities, privacy, and education advocacy groups are pushing the state of Florida to stop developing the Florida Schools Safety Portal, a database of detailed information about students for the claimed purpose of preventing school shootings, calling it a "massive
-
Bahrain has warned its citizens and residents could face legal action simply for following social media accounts it deems anti-government, which raises concerns about the ability of Bahraini citizens and residents to exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms. In May 2019, a state terrorism law
-
Amazon shareholders rejected two non-binding proposals governing its facial recognition software, Rekognition: one would have limited sales of Rekognition to governments, unless a board determined that such sales would not violate peoples’ rights, and the other was to study the extent to which
-
GDPR complaints about Real-Time Bidding (RTB) in the online advertising industry were filed today with Data Protection Authorities in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The complaints detail the vast scale of personal data leakage by Google and other major companies in the “Ad Tech”
-
As a part of Facebook’s efforts to curb disinformation and misinformation on its platform, the company introduced new rules over how political content is marked. This has resulted in content that is educational, news articles, and otherwise seemingly non-political being marked incorrectly and taken
-
Political ads on Facebook are meant to be marked with a disclaimer that says who paid for the ad, as well as be archived into the platform’s ad library, where users are able to see more information about how an ad was targeted. It’s important to note that the ‘who paid for the ad’ requirement is
-
Facebook has taken down 65 accounts, 161 pages, dozens of groups and four Instagram accounts, which were ran by Archimedes Group, an Israeli political consulting and lobbying firm that aimed at disrupting elections in various countries. Archimedes was mostly active in Sub-Saharan Africa but also
-
Facebook's efforts to remove disinformation in the wake of the 2019 Ukrainian Presidential election have so far failed. Politico reports that "Among the Facebook pages that spread spurious claims during the election was one with more than 100,000 followers that ran a video claiming (the Presidential
-
Absher, an online platform and mobile phone app created by the Saudi Arabian government, can allow men to restrict women’s ability to travel, live in Saudi Arabia, or access government services. This app, which is available in the Google and Apple app stores, supports and enables the discriminatory
-
The Irish Data Protection Commission has today launched an inquiry into the data practices of ad-tech company Quantcast, a major player in the online tracking industry. PI's 2018 investigation and subsequent submission to the Irish DPC showed how the company is systematically collecting and
-
The New York Times picked 16 categories (like registered Democrats or people trying to lose weight) and targeted ads at people in them. They used the ads to reveal the invisible information itself, noting that it is a "story of how our information is used not just to target us but to manipulate
-
A private intelligence company, LookingGlass Cyber Solutions, used social media to monitor more than 600 “Family Separation Day Protests” held across the United States on June 30, 2018, to oppose the Trump administration’s policy family separation policy. The policy was part of a “zero tolerance”
-
The two leading Presidential candidates in Ukraine's 2019 elections have expressed frustration at major social media platform's seemingly lack of assistance combatting disinformation and bots. Bots flood social media networks and can promote content or flood platforms with pull requests to have a
-
In Ireland benefits claimants are expected to register for a Public Services Card (PSC) in order to access benefits. PSC users are expected to have their photographs taken in department offices, which is then digitally captured along with their signature. While this card was originally created to
-
On April 16th 2019, Italy’s antitrust authority said that it had launched a probe into five Amazon companies for possible abuse of dominant market position in e-commerce and logistical services. The companies being looked into include Amazon Services Europe, Amazon Europe Core, Amazon EU, Amazon
-
In an effort to improve political advertising transparency, Canada drafted a Bill that requires companies to develop ad libraries, to which ads are added immediately in order for researchers, journalists, and other people to be able to search and understand how political actors are targeting ads. In
-
An investigation by Bloomberg, disclosed that thousands of Amazon employees around the world are listening in on Amazon Echo users.
-
The rise of social media has also been a game changer in the tracking of benefits claimants. In the UK in 2019, a woman was jailed after she was jailed for five months after pictures of her partying in Ibiza emerged on social media. She had previously sued the NHS for £2.5 million, after surviving a
-
The Five Star Movement, a populist party, which is currently in power along with the League in Italy initially grew out of Il Blog delle Stelle (formerly Beppe Grillo’s blog). The Five Star Movement was founded by comedian Beppe Grillo, along with Gianroberto Casaleggio, a web strategist in 2009. As
-
Dr Johnny Ryan filed a formal complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission against IAB Europe, the tracking industry’s primary lobbying organization. The complaint was filed against IAB Europe’s use of an unlawful “cookie wall” on its website. Visitors to IAB Europe’s website, www.iabeurope
-
The European Commission, EU’s antitrust watchdog, is nearing a decision on its investigation into Amazon. According to a report in Seeking Alpha, EU Competition Chief Margrethe Vestager said the Commission gathered “a lot of data” in its investigation into Amazon. The report noted the EU sent out 1
-
Volunteers for Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy were tasked with pouring over social media sites to search for disinformation and combat bot armies that spread negative comments about the candidate. Facebook has been slow to take down 'fake news' and so the volunteers search social media
-
In London, four boroughs have been trialling the London Counter Fraud Hub. The hub is designed to process huge quantities of data from millions of household to detect certain types of fraud involving the single person council tax discount (in London, a person living alone gets a reduced rate on
-
In February 2019, an examination of Facebook's searchable database of Indian political ads showed that in India political ads on Facebook were viewed nine times more often by men than by women. Facebook's Indian user base was reported as 24% female in 2016. The reason for the disparity in ad viewing
-
In August 2018, Apple forced Facebook to remove its Onava VPN from the App Store because the Facebook had been using it to harvest data across multiple apps and track user activity. In January 2019, a TechCrunch investigation revealed that in a separate part of the same programme Facebook had been
-
In February 2019, a faulty firmware update meant that Nike's latest $350 Adapt BB self-lacing shoes could not pair with the app that allows owners to adjust their tightness, customise the lights, and check remaining battery life. Because the shoes have no physical laces, the error effectively made
-
In February 2019, an anonymous tip-off to Computer Sweden revealed that a database containing recordings of 170,000 hours of calls made to the Vårdguiden 1177 non-emergency healthcare advice line was left without encryption or password protection on an open web server provided by Voice Integrate
-
In February 2019, shortly after eight British Labour MPs quit the party and formed the "Independent Group", one of them was caught accessing data and campaigning tools belonging to their former party. In response, Labour shut down access to tools Contact Creator, used to collect campaign data and
-
In February 2019, Twitter announced it would expand the political campaigning policy it launched in the US in May 2018 to all EU member states, Australia, and India, commencing March 11. Once the policy is live, only certified advertisers would be allowed to run political campaign ads on the service
-
In February 2019, with a general election expected in May, the Australian government revealed that Australia's main political parties had been hacked by a "sophisticated state actor". The Australian Cyber Security Centre uncovered the hack while investigating a just-revealed hack of the Australian
-
The National Board of Scholarships and School Aid (Junaeb) in Chile was also heavily criticised for its use of facial recognition programmes to deliver meals at thirty schools in three cities across the country. After the Supreme Court requested in 2017 that the system must not be applied without
-
In October 2018, Google developers announced Manifest V3, a new standard for developing extensions for its Chrome web browser. One of the modifications included replacing the API used by extensions that need to intercept and work with network requests. The new API, DeclarativeNetRequest, limits the
-
In 2016, Jamie Siminoff, the CEO of the miniature security camera company Ring, emailed his employees information them that the company would adopt a new mission to fight crime by using consumer electronics. The company, which Amazon acquired in 2018, sells its cameras with a social app, "Neighbors"
-
Similar to the European Commission’s investigation and the stand-alone German and Italian investigations into Amazon’s anti-competitive behaviour, Austria is now investigating whether Amazon is exploiting its market dominance in relation to other retailers that use its website as a marketplace. The
-
In February 2019, the World Food Programme, a United Nations aid agency, announced a five-year, $45 million partnership with the data analytics company Palantir. WFP, the world's largest humanitarian organisation focusing on hunger and food security, hoped that Palantir, better known for partnering
-
A couple who tried, in February 2018, to keep their unborn child a secret from the internet, in part so the child could create its own internet identity when it was ready. They had some success in avoiding being pursued by baby-related ads, but found themselves unable to exercise the control they
-
In February 2019, publicity led the gay dating app Jack'd, which claimed to have more than 5 million users and was ranked among the top four gay social apps on both Apple and Android, to close a security flaw that meant that photos users uploaded to share in private chat sessions were accessible to
-
In January 2019, Facebook announced that as of February 28 the site would add more information to that displayed when users click on the "Why am I seeing this?" button that appears next to ads on the service. Along with the brand that paid for the ad, some of the biographical details they'd targeted
-
In February 2019, Joke Schauvliege, an environment minister in Flanders, was forced to resign after she suggested that Belgian intelligence services had information showing that the schoolchildren's strikes to protest climate change were being directed by others. The largest march in Belgium to date
-
In its February 2019 iOS release (12.2), Apple introduced a toggle enabling users to control whether websites received motion and orientation data collected by the gyroscope and accelerometer inside the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The change is believed to be in response to a 2018 report that
-
In February 2019, the cybersecurity company Trend Micro found that at least 29 beauty and photo editing apps that had been downloaded more than 4 million times from Google's Play Store included code that pushed full-screen ads for fraudulent or pornography content or that directed users to phishing
-
In February 2019 the UK Information Commissioner's Office issued fines totalling £120,000 against the EU referendum campaign Leave.EU (£15,000 and £45,000) and Eldon Insurance (£60,000), trading as Go Skippy Insurance, for serious breaches of electronic marketing laws. The ICO also said it would
-
In late 2018, researchers at SINTEF Digital Norway, ETH Zurich, and Berlin's Technical University discovered a new and serious vulnerability in several generations of the cellular mobile communications protocols: 3G, 4G, and the upcoming 5G. The flaw affected Authentication and Key Agreement, which
-
In January 2019, researchers reported finding two huge data dumps. Collection #1 contained passwords and usernames relating to nearly 773 million email addresses spread across about 2.7 spreadsheet rows in 12,000 files. Collection #2.5 contained 845GB of data and more than 25 billion records that
-
In January 2019 Apple briefly disabled the group functionality in its FaceTime video calling application after bug was discovered that allowed users to listen on the people they were calling when they did not pick up the call and also allowed some callers to see video of the person they were calling
-
Panoptykon Foundation, the Warsaw based digital rights organization, has joined in the complaints filed in the UK and Ireland in September by Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, Michael Veale of University College London, and Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, by filing a new complaint in Poland. Together
-
As part of its planning for the 2020 Olympic Games, due to be held in Tokyo, Japan approved a law that would allow the government to conduct a survey to identify vulnerable Internet of Things devices. The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology staff who carry out the survey
-
In January 2019, the British transparency NGO WhoTargetsMe, Mozilla, and the US investigative journalism site Pro Publica reported that recent changes in the social network's code were restricting their ability to monitor political ads on Facebook. The company said the changes were part of a
-
In January 2019 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it was investigating an incident in which the food service company Deliveroo reported that some of its customers had complained they were charged up to £1,000 for orders they had not placed. Customers have used social media to
-
By January 2019, more than 100 million women worldwide were using smartphone apps that began as period-tracking apps but were beginning to branch out into tracking other types of health data - and also to broaden their use of the data they collect in search or profit. Unlike medical establishments
-
The vast majority of public benefits programs in the United States—Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Housing Assistance—do not take the
-
In January 2019 Twitter revealed that it had discovered a security flaw in that meant that Android users who updated the email address linked to their account between November 2014 and January 2019 had inadvertently turned off the "protected" setting on their accounts so that their tweets could have
-
In January 2019, Facebook' announced it had removed multiple pages, groups, and accounts coordinating inauthentic behaviour on Facebook and Instagram that were set up by two unrelated operations originating in Russia. One of these operated 364 pages and accounts was active in the Baltics, Central
-
In January 2019, Facebook announced it would extend some of the rules and transparency tools it developed for political advertising for upcoming spring elections in Nigeria, Ukraine, India, and the EU. In Nigeria, the site will bar electoral ads from advertisers outside the country where the
-
A vulnerability in Amadeus, the customer reservation system used by 144 of the world's airlines, was only superficially patched after a team reported the vulnerability in 2018. As a result, an attacker could alter online strangers' Passenger Name Records, which contain all the details of the
-
Despite Facebook's October 2018 rules intended to provide greater transparency about political ads, the sources of funding for UK political ads remained obscure in early 2019. when a network of hard-Brexit and people's vote campaigning groups spent more than £1 million on Facebook ads in the lead-up
-
The miniature security camera maker Ring, which was acquired by Amazon in 2017 for a reported $1 billion, has a history of inadequate oversight of the data collected by those cameras on behalf of its customers. In 2016, it reportedly granted virtually unlimited access to its Ukraine-based research
-
On January 9, 2019 the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined SCL Elections, also known as Cambridge Analytica, £15,000 for failure to comply with an enforcement notice the ICO issued in May 2018 ordering the company to respond in full to a subject access request submitted by US-based academic
-
The US government created a database of more than 50 journalists and immigrant rights advocates, many of whom were American citizens, associated with the journey of migrants travelling from Central America to the Mexico-US border in late 2018. Officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP)
-
It was already known that law enforcement agencies can track phones to within 500 metres if they show service providers a warrant, but in January 2019, it became clear that the same real-time location data was being sold to a wide range of third parties, including car salesmen, property managers
-
A November 2018 breach of a government-funded resettlement agency's database in South Korea allowed hackers, believed to be North Korean state security officials, to copy the personal information belonging to 997 North Koreans living in South Korea. Escaping to South Korea is considered an act of
-
In December 2018, the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) warned that data misuse and voter behavioural targeting and micro-targeting could prove factors in the 2019 Indonesian general elections. Researcher Wahyudi Djafar cited examples from Kenya, where Cambridge Analytica had sent
-
In December 2018, the security researchers at 0DayAllDay discovered that the encryption keys hard-coded into the firmware inside the Guardzilla indoor wireless security system were protected by a ten-year-old, easily cracked algorithm. Because all the devices used the same keys, anyone could use the
-
In 2014, when the the far-right party of French politician Marine Le Pen needed cash, the loan of €9.4 million came from First Czech-Russian Bank, which was founded in the early 2000s as a joint venture between a Czech state bank and a Russian lender and went on to come under the personal ownership
-
A startling amount of the internet is fake in one way or another, studies found in 2018. Less than 60% of web traffic is human; a 2013 study found that at least half of YouTube traffic was bots masquerading as people; in November 2018 the US Justice Department revealed that eight people were accused
-
Shortly after the 2016 US presidential election, LinkedIn founder and billionaire Reid Hoffman made a series of multi-million-dollar donations to dozens of left-leaning groups. Among them was American Engagement Technologies, in which Hoffman invested $750,000. In 2018, Hoffman wound up apologising
-
In November 2018, the criminal hacker group 3ve found a new way of exploiting security weaknesses in the Border Gateway Protocol that allowed them to take control of IP addresses belonging to the US Air Force and other reputable organisations; the result was to net them $29 million in fraudulent
-
Millions of people own smart home devices like the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot—equipped with the Alex cloud-based artificial intelligence service—which have concerning implications for privacy rights. While, Amazon’s own policies promise that only the user and Amazon will listen to what those devices
-
In 2015, officials within the US Treasury Department Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes unit used a network of private Gmail and Hotmail accounts set up by the Russians with the stated goal of jointly defeating ISIS. Soon, however, instead the Russian financial crimes agency was
-
A December 2018 report prepared by the Oxford Internet Institute's Computational propaganda Research Project and the network analysis firm Graphika for the US Senate Intelligence Committee found that the campaign conducted by Russia's Internet Research Agency during the 2016 US presidential election
-
A December 2018 analysis of the use of Facebook by Matteo Salvini and Luigi Di Maio, Italy's two populist leaders, showed that the two exploited Facebook's streaming video and live broadcast services to bypass the mainstream media and foment discord during the March 2018 Italian general election
-
The New York City public benefits system has been criticized for its punitive design, how it too often disciplines, rather than helps, people who are legally entitled to benefits. According to Mariana Chilton, the public benefits system is designed to control, surveil, and penalize low-income people
-
In December 2018 Facebook revealed that over a 12-day period in September a software bug may have wrongly allowed about 1,500 third-party apps to access 6.8 million users' photos, including some that people began uploading to the social network but didn't go on to finish posting. EPIC executive
-
In December 2018 reports emerged that the Indian Electoral Commission would propose amendments to the Representation of the People Act 1951 that would require citizens to link their Electoral Photo ID Card to their Aadhaar number with the stated goal of improving the accuracy of the electoral rolls
-
A December 2018 analysis found that Facebook's measures for improving election security and discouraging anonymous political messages were poorly executed and inconsistently applied, and placed an unfair burden on charitable organisations and small businesses while simultaneously being easy for
-
On 14 May 2018, the husband of the victim, a pharmacist living in Linthorpe in Middlesbrough, subdued his wife with insulin injection before straggling her. He then ransacked the house to make it appear as a burglary. The data recorded by the health app on the murder’s phone, showed him racing
-
During the campaign leading up to the 2018 US midterm elections, the email accounts of four senior aides at the National Republican Congressional Committee were surveilled for several months. The intrusion was detected in April 2018 by an NRCC vendor, who alerted the committee and its cybersecurity
-
In Israel, the National Insurance Institute – in charge of granting benefits – eventually dropped a tender that had caused outrage in the country after being uncovered by Haaretz and Channel 13. The tender revealed the NII was trying to collect online data about benefits claimants – including from
-
Days after the 2018 shooting that killed 11 Jewish congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue, The Intercept found that Facebook still allowed advertisers to choose "white genocide conspiracy theory" as a targeting criterion, capturing 168,000 members of the social network. The technique used was the
-
In December 2018, a hacker made more than 50,000 internet-connected printers worldwide print out flyers asking everyone to subscribe to the YouTube channel belonging to PewDiePie, whose real name is Felix Kjellberg. PewDiePie, who has had the most subscribers on YouTube since 2013, was in danger of
-
Following Ms. Vestager’s investigation into Amazon and its own sector enquiry into online price comparison services in October 2017, in June 2018 the German Federal Cartel Office (“Bundeskartellamt”) claimed that it “ received a lot of complaints” and is said to be “ looking at the role and market
-
In November 2018, Germany's Federal Cyberintelligence Agency (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, or BSI) released a highly detailed analysis of the myriad ways that Windows 10 tracks users and showing that only enterprise versions of Windows have the ability to turn them off. BSI
-
In November 2018 the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined Uber's European operation £385,000 for inadequate security that permitted a November 2016 data breach affecting nearly 3 million British users and 82,000 drivers. In the 2016 breach, attackers obtained credentials that allowed them to
-
In the run-up to the May 2019 European Parliament elections, Google announced it would launch a new set of transparency tools to combat voter manipulation. Before being allowed to buy advertising on Google platforms, campaigns will be required to verify their identity, and approved ads will be
-
In November 2018, the Spanish senate approved 220-21 an online data protection law intended to ensure compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation with an added amendment that allowed political parties to use personal data obtained from web pages and other publicly accessible sources for
-
A 2018 study found that Twitter bots played a disproportionate role in spreading the false claim, made by US President Donald Trump shortly after winning the election but losing the popular vote in November 2016, that 3 million illegal immigrants had voted for Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton
-
In November 2018 the campaign group Freedom from Facebook used the social network's own advertising tools to promote a "safe space" website where they can submit whistleblower tips anonymously. Facebook declined to comment but did not appear to be blocking the ads nor keeping a log of who viewed
-
Police in the German state of Hesse are using a bespoke version of Palantir's Gotham software system, specially adapted for the police force. Palantir CEO Alex Karp sits on the board of the German mega publisher Axel Springer. Publication: WorldCrunch, Jannis Brühl Date: 20 November 2018
-
As part of the digital campaign to win re-election, in mid-2018 the BJP, which controls the Indian national government as well as that of the state of Chhattisbarh, handed out $71 million worth of free phones and subsidised data plans to 2.9 million of the state's voters and then used the phones to
-
With only days to go before the 2018 US midterm elections, a federal judge ruled that the state of Georgia must change its "exact match" law that required voter registrations with even the tiniest variation from other official identifications to be flagged as potential non-citizens unless they could
-
In November 2018 Bidooh announced it was developing an intelligent and automated digital billboard advertising platform that it said would leverage facial recognition and blockchain technology to track engagement. Billboard advertising is valued globally at almost $34.8 billion a year. Bidooh has
-
In November 2018, a security researcher found that the location-tracking children's watch MiSafe's Kid Watcher Plus, originally released in 2015, neither encrypted nor secured the children's accounts, allowing him to track their movements, secretly listen in to their activities, and spoof calls to
-
In November 2018, a report by the consultancy Privacy Company, on behalf of the Dutch Ministry of Justice, found that Microsoft could be breaking European data collection rules because its Office software was collecting large amounts of personal data including email subject lines and snippets of
-
In yet another murder case, a New Hampshire judge ordered Amazon to turn over two days of Amazon Echo recordings in a double murder case in November 2018. Prosecutors believe that recordings from an Amazon Echo in the Farmington home where two women were murdered in January 2017 may yield further
-
Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK. It’s been more than five months since the EU’s
-
In November 2018, HSBC announced a serious data breach in its US business between October 4 and 14, when fraudsters used credential stuffing to gain access to detailed account information relating to about 1% of its 1.4 million US customers. HSBC said that in response it had strengthened its login
-
Shortly before the 2018 US midterm elections, Georgia secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp accused Georgia's Democratic Party of hacking into the state's voter registration database, though without providing any evidence to support the claim. The motives behind the claim were
-
Shortly before the November 2018 US midterm elections, the Center for Media and Democracy uncovered documents showing that the multi-billionaire Koch brothers have developed detailed personality profiles on 89 percent of the US population with the goal of using them to launch a private propaganda
-
In November 2018, the UK government announced it would pilot voter ID for in 11 local authorities during thte 2019 local elections in order to gain insight into ensuring voting security and lowering the risk of voter fraud. The Cabinet Office deemed the pilots conducted in five local authorities
-
The results of a year-long review issued by the UK Information Commissioner's Office in November 2018 uncovered a "disturbing disregard for voters' personal privacy" on the part of 30 organisations, including social media platforms, political parties, data brokers, and credit reference agencies
-
During the November 2018 US midterm elections, Moveon conducted an experiment to test whether it could cheaply and quickly maximise the effectiveness of digital persuasion. The project created a Facebook app called MO Research, and recruited people to answer survey questions about current issues via
-
In November 2018, the UK government announced that 11 local authorities across England would participate in Voter ID pilots in the interest of gaining "further insight into how best to ensure the security of the voting process and reduce the risk of voter fraud". Five local authorities participated
-
Facebook's latest tool for inspecting political ads showed that in the run-up to the US mid-term elections in November 2018, many of the same politicians who had been questioning Facebook about privacy and leaked user data were spending campaign funds on advertisements on the service. Between 2014
-
A November 2018 report from Data & Society discusses "data craft", the methods manipulators use to create disinformation with falsified metadata, specifically platform activity signals, which can be read by machine learning algorithms, platforms, and humans. Manipulators use platform features in
-
Days before the US November 2018 midterm elections, ProPublica discovered that an organisation called Energy4US spent $20,000 to run ads on Facebook pushing conservatives to support the Trump administration's reversal of fuel emission standards. On closer scrutiny, Energy4US appeared to be a front
-
In 2018, the EU announced iBorderCtrl, a six-month pilot led by the Hungarian National Police to install an automated lie detection test at four border crossing points in Hungary, Latvia, and Greece. The system uses an animated AI border agent that records travellers' faces while asking questions
-
In the run-up to the November 2018 US midterm elections, Vice tested Facebook's new system of mandatory "Paid for" disclosure intended to bring greater transparency to the sources of ads relating to "issues of national importance". Placing political ads requires a valid ID and proof of residence
-
In 2017, Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs began a collaboration with Waterfront Toronto intended to turn a 12-acre lakeside area into a "smart city" equipped with sensors and responsive infrastructure. Frustration that Torontonians' data privacy concerns were not being addressed led Saadia Muzaffar, founder
-
In 2018, to enhance its AI capabilities Oracle acquired DataFox, which supplies business intelligence that can be used to help businesses plan a variety of customer relationship management services. The startup has a database covering 2.8 million public and private businesses and expecting to add 1
-
More than 450 Amazon employees delivered a letter to Jeff Bezos and other Amazon executives, demanding that the company immediately stop selling facial recognition software to law enforcement, sever connections to companies like Palantir that help immigration authorities track and deport immigrants
-
In October 2018, researcher Johannes Eichstaedt led a project to study how the words people use on social media reflect their underlying psychological state. Working with 1,200 patients at a Philadelphia emergency department, 114 of whom had a depression diagnosis, Eichstaedt's group studied their
-
A database compiled through investigations conducted in 2018 by the Guardian and the Undercover Research Group network of activists shows that undercover police officers spied on 124 left-wing activist groups between 1970 and 2007. The police infiltrated 24 officers over that time within the
-
In the run-up to the US 2018 mid-term elections, Facebook announced it would broaden the company's policies against voter suppression by banning misrepresentations about how to vote and whether a vote will be counted. The company also introduced a reporting option to allow users to report incorrect
-
In October 2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and questions over Facebook's influence on the UK's EU referendum, Facebook announced it would add Britain to the US and Brazil on the list of countries where the company will no longer allow political groups to publish "dark" ads on
-
In March 2018 the Palo Alto startup Mindstrong Health, founded by three doctors, began clinical tests of an app that uses patients' interactions with their smartphones to monitor their mental state. The app, which is being tested on people with serious illness, measures the way patients swipe, tap
-
A few months before the US 2018 midterm elections, the Trump campaign team signed a contract with the newly-formed Virginia-based company Excelsior Strategies to exploit the first-party data the campaign had collected. The contract was set up by Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who built the
-
In the months leading up to the US 2018 midterm elections, Republican officials in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina made moves they described as ensuring voting integrity but which critics saw as blocking voter access. In Georgia, where Secretary of State Brian Kemp is charged with enforcing
-
In October 2018, a transparency report from the smart home company Nest, which Google acquired for $3.2 billion in 2014, found that between 2015 and 2018 Nest had been told to hand over data on 300 separate occasions relating to up to 525 Nest account holders. Nest turned over data in fewer than 20%
-
In announcing a data breach in 2018, at first Facebook said 50 million people's data had been accessed, then 30 million - but the data accessed was more sensitive than they thought at first. After investigation, the company explained that it had identified four stages of attack with a different
-
In October 2018, the app that supports the burglar alarm functions of Yale's "smart" locks and burglar alarms was disabled for 24 hours after an "unforeseen issue while carrying out unplanned network maintenance". Customers complained that they were unable to open or lock doors or disarm alarms, and
-
In the run-up to the 2018 US mid-term elections, researchers found that the dissemination of fake news on Facebook was increasingly a domestic American phenomenon rather than, as in the 2016 presidential election, an effort driven by state-backed Russian operatives. Removing such accounts (Twitter)
-
From 2014 to early 2017, Amazon used an artificial intelligence (AI) hiring tool to review prospective employees’ resumes and select qualified candidates, based on Amazon’s previous hiring decisions from a ten-year period; however, the tool was much more effective at simply selecting male candidates
-
In October 2018 Amazon patented a new version of its Alexa virtual assistant that would analyse speech to identify signs of illness or emotion and offer to sell remedies. The patent also envisions using the technology to target ads. Although the company may never exploit the patent, the NHS had
-
In 2018, the French company Criteo announced it would link up with the ecommerce company Shopify to enable retailers and merchants of all sizes to use its technology to target users across channels and devices and scale up their businesses. Retailers will not need to expand their IT resources. https
-
In 2018, the French company Criteo formed a partnership with AgilOne to identify and link customer behaviour across multiple online and offline channels. The service is intended to make the ads consumers see more relevant, but also stop showing them ads for products they've already bought in offline
-
Google announced on October 8 having discovered a vulnerability in the Google+ API which has been open since 2015. This vulnerability allowed third-party developers to access data for more than 500,000 users, including their usernames, email addresses, occupation, date of birth, profile photos, and
-
The 90-year old suspect when to his stepdaughter's house at San Jose, California for a brief visit. Five days later, his stepdaugter's body, Karen was discovered by a co-worker in her house with fatal lacerations on her head and neck. The police used the data recorded by the victim's Fitbit fitness
-
A little over a month before the US 2018 midterm elections, Twitter updated its rules to reduce manipulation of its platform. Among the changes, the company outlined the factors it would use to determine whether an account is fake and should be removed, provided an update on its automated detection
-
In September 2017, the UN Capital Development Fund, the UN Development Programme, and the non-profit San Francisco-based startup Kiva, which has worked for 13 years as a crowd-funded microlending platform announced a joint initiative to open up financial services to the 20% of the Sierra Leone
-
In September 2018, the US Department of Homeland Security proposed to add credit scores and histories to the list of information immigrants are required to submit when applying for legal resident status. The stated purpose of the proposed rule is to bar those who might become a "public charge" from
-
At the end of September 2018, the sales intelligence company and data aggregator Apollo notified its customers that over the summer Vinny Troia, the founder of Night Lion Security, had discovered that Apollo's database of 212 million contact listings and 9 billion data points relating to companies
-
A flaw in the official 2018 UK Conservative Party conference app granted both read and write access to the private data of senior party members, including cabinet ministers, to anyone who logged in by second-guessing the email address they used to sign into the app. Twitter users claimed that one
-
30 million users had their accounts breached, with a total of 90 million accounts reset after Facebook's "view as" feature leaked unique user account access tokens, allowing attackers to not only trivially impersonate any other user on the platform, but also to potentially automate the attack on a
-
The proposed extension to the Trans Mountain pipeline, which would connect Alberta and British Columbia in parallel to the existing pipeline and triple its capacity, was controversial for years before Canada approved the project in 2016. In 2014, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association
-
Canada began experiments introducing automated decision-making algorithms into its immigration systems to support evaluation of some of the country's immigrant and visitor applications in 2014. In a 2018 study, Citizen Lab and NewsDeeply found that AI's use was expanding despite concerns about bias
-
In 2018, experiments showed that despite the company's denials, ads could be targeted at specific Facebook users via information that the users had never given Facebook, such as phone numbers. The reason: Facebook allows advertisers to upload their own lists of phone numbers of email addresses, and
-
In September 2018, researchers discovered that websites accessed via mobile phones could access an array of device sensors, unlike apps, which request permissions for such access. The researchers found that 3,695 of the top 100,000 websites incorporate scripts that tap into one or more sensors
-
In 2018, WhatsApp founder Brian Acton responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal by tweeting "It is time. #deletefacebook." He also left the company, walking away from $850 million in unvested stock rather than accede to Facebook's plans to add advertising and commercial messaging, a purpose at
-
A combination of entrenched and litigious voting machine manufacturers with immense control over their proprietary software and a highly complex and fragmented voting infrastructure mean that even though concerns were raised as early as 2004 about the security of US voting machines, the 2018 midterm
-
In 2018, the Paris prosecutor's office opened a preliminary inquiry after the lawyer Pierre Farge accused a Bercy specialist intelligence branch of the tax authorities of hacking his firm's database to access information covered by professional confidentiality. The case serves to illustrate the
-
The internet provides employers with the opportunity to learn an unprecedented amount about prospective employees by searching social media feeds and other postings. By 2018, DeepSense was taking this a step further by analysing individual's Twitter feeds to predict their personality and employment
-
Reports that Amazon is planning on launching a free ad-supported music service caused Spotify’s (the Swedish audio streaming platform) shares to fall 4% on Monday, April 15th. And, on April 18th, Amazon published a blog post where it announced that launch of Amazon’s free music-streaming service in
-
In 2018 a report from the Royal United Services Institute found that UK police were testing automated facial recognition, crime location prediction, and decision-making systems but offering little transparency in evaluating them. An automated facial recognition system trialled by the South Wales
-
In September 2018 the UK's Information Commissioner found that it was likely that during 2017 a number of migrant rough sleepers were reported to the Home Office enforcement teams by the homelessness charity St. Mungo's. The finding followed a complaint from the Public Interest Law Unit. The charity
-
In 2017, the head of China’s security and intelligence systems, Meng Jianzhu, called on security forces to break down barriers to data sharing in order to use AI and cloud computing to find patterns that could predict and prevent terrorist attacks. Meng also called for increased integration of the
-
In September 2018, Google warned a selection of US senators and their aides that their Gmail accounts were being targeted by foreign government hackers. Google has issued warnings of phishing attempts by state-sponsored actors since 2012, though getting a notice does not mean the account has been
-
In September 2018, the 156-year-old US life insurance company John Hancock announced it would stop underwriting traditional life insurance policies, instead selling only interactive policies that track health and fitness through the data collected by wearable devices and smartphones. Interactive
-
In September 2018, EU’s antitrust watchdog, the European Commission, launched a preliminary investigation into how the platform uses data about merchants. Margrethe Vestager, EU Competition Commissioner said that the informal probe concerns the e-commerce group’s dual role as a competitor while
-
In internet scans conducted between August 2016 and August 2018, Canada's Citizen Lab identified a total of 45 countries in which operators of Israel-based NSO Group's Pegasus spyware may be conducting surveillance operations. Pegasus is mobile phone spyware that targets are coerced into installing
-
In September 2017, soon after announcing the company had suffered a major data breach that exposed sensitive information pertaining to about 150 million people, Equifax set up a poorly secured website intended to help people determine whether they had been affected. The site was flagged by numerous
-
In 2018, at least five British local authorities began developing systems intended to use predictive analytics to identify families needing attention from child services on the basis that algorithmic profiling could help them target their scarce resources more efficiently. Data about at least 377
-
In September 2018, when Massachusetts state police tweeted a map of responses to fires and explosions during a gas emergency, they inadvertently revealed that they were closely monitoring several activist groups, including a Facebook group for Mass Action Against Police Brutality, the Coalition to
-
In 2014, Britain announced an infrastructure plan requiring all energy suppliers to offer smart meters to all homes and businesses by the end of 2020. With two years to go, at the end of 2018, the problems customers experienced after making the switch led to calls to halt the rollout, which had
-
In September 2018, Google was discovered to be prototyping a search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, designed to comply with China's censorship regime. Among other features, Dragonfly would tie users' searches to their personal phone numbers, ensuring the government could track their queries. Among the
-
In September 2018, a number of people whose Google Pixel phones, Essential Phone, OnePlus 6, Nokia handsets, and other devices running Android 9 Pie discovered that the devices had, apparently autonomously, activated the software's Battery Saver feature. Google later explained that an internal
-
In September 2018, Acxiom introduced an open data framework intended to create an omnichannel view of the people in its database. The company claims this "unified data layer" will let customer companies connect their marketing technology and ad technology ecosystems and connect the online world to
-
Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection authorities against Google and other ad tech firms. The complainants are being made by Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, the private web browser, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, and Michael Veale of University
-
In September 2018, the attorney general of the US state of New Mexico filed suit against Lithuania-based Tiny Lab Productions claiming that the maker of the children's app Fun Kid Racing had violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (1998) by collecting location and other data about the
-
In September 2018, a software patch was found by journalists to be widely available, that disabled or weakened the security features in the software used to enroll people on the Aadhaar databse, potentially from anywhere in the world. The patch was reportedly widely-available in WhatsApp groups
-
In September 2018, AI Now co-founder Meredith Whittaker sounded the alarm about the potential for abuse of the convergence of neuroscience, human enhancement, and AI in the form of brain-computer interfaces. Part of Whittaker's concern was that the only companies with the computational power
-
In September 2018, the GuardianApp group of security researchers discovered that dozens of popular news, weather, and fitness iPhone apps that require access to location data sell the data they collect to companies engaged in businesses such as ad targeting. The group found apps such as ASKfm, NOAA
-
Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the New York City Police Department installed thousands of CCTV cameras and by 2008 in partnership with Microsoft had built the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center to consolidate its video surveillance operations into a single command centre that also
-
After a series of scandals, in the year up to September 2018 54% of American Facebook users had changed their privacy settings and 42% had skipped visiting the platform for several weeks or more. About 26% said they had deleted the Facebook app from their smartphone. Some 74% of Facebook users had
-
In 2018, a group of researchers from the Campaign for Accountability posed as Russian trolls and were able to purchase divisive online ads and target them at Americans using Google's advertising platform. The researchers constructed fake profiles using the name and identifying details of the
-
For many Filipinos, Facebook is their only way online because subsidies have kept it free to use on mobile phones since its launch in the country in 2013, while the open web is expensive to access. The social media network is believed to have been an important engine behind the ascent to the
-
In September 2018, security researcher Patrick Wardle found that Adware Doctor, the top-selling paid utilities app in the US Mac App Store, was exfiltrating the browser history of anyone who downloaded it and sending it to a developer. Adware Doctor is intended to protect browsers against adware. A
-
In August 2018, two lawsuits, were filed against NSO Group, one brought in Israel by a Qatari citizen and the other in Cyprus by Mexican journalists and activists. All the plaintiffs had been targeted by the company's Pegasus spyware, which takes control of targets' phones when they click on links
-
The payday lender Wonga announced in April 2017 that a data breach at the company affected an estimated 270,000 customers, 245,000 of them in the UK and the rest in Poland. The company sent those it thought were affected messages warning that it believed there may have been illegal and unauthorised
-
After four years of negotiation, in 2017 Google began paying Mastercard millions of dollars for access to the latter's piles of transaction data as part of its "Stores Sales Measurement" service. Google, which claimed to have access to 70% of US credit and debit cards through partners, said that
-
By the time T-Mobile announced in August 2018 that a data breach had compromised customers' names, billing zip codes, email addresses, account numbers, account types, phone numbers, and some hashed passwords, the most crucial of these had become phone numbers. Never intended as identifiers, phone
-
In 2018, changes to Apple's rules for data collection led Facebook to withdraw its Onavo Protect VPN app from the app store. The app's function was to warn users when they were visiting potentially harmful websites and protected their data when using public wifi. However, the app also collected data
-
In August 2018, domestic abuse victims, their lawyers, shelter workers, and emergency responders began finding that the Internet of Things was becoming an alarming new tool for harassment, monitoring, revenge, and control. Smartphone apps enable abusers to remotely control everyday objects inside
-
Facebook-owned Onavo VPN (adertised as a way to block harmful websites, and keep a user's data safe) is pulled from the Apple App Store due to tracking, collecting, and analysing customers' usage data, including from other unrelated apps. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/facebook-violates
-
In August 2018, the US Democratic National Committee notified the FBI that the San Francisco-based security company Lookout and the cloud service provider DigitalOcean had detected an attempted hack targeted at the DNC voter database. The attack took the form of a fake DNC login page intended to
-
The 2017 hack of the shipping company A.P. Møller-Maersk, which manages 800 seafaring vessels and 76 ports that handle nearly a fifth of the world's shipping capacity, required an emergency shutdown of the company's entire IT system, including its phones. Maersk was a victim of NotPetya, the most
-
In August 2018, Facebook announced it would remove more than 5,000 ad targeting options in order to prevent discrimination. Options specifying the exclusion of people interested in "Passover", "Native American culture", or "Islam" could be used as proxies to allow advertisers to exclude ethnic and
-
In August 2018 the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first over-the-counter digital contraceptive, an app called Natural Cycles. The app, which analyses basal body temperature readings and monthly menstruation data to determine whether unprotected sex is likely to lead to pregnancy
-
US Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) used social media monitoring to track groups and people in New York City associated with public events opposing the Trump administration’s policies, including ones related to immigration and gun control. The investigative branch of ICE created and
-
As the use of non-cash payment mechanisms continued to increase over the course of 2018, Europe's central banks began warning that phasing out cash poses a serious threat to the financial system, as too-heavy reliance on digital payments exposes countries to the potential for catastrophic failure
-
In August 2018, three months after the General Data Protection Regulation came into force in the EU, Quantcast reported that over 90% of visitors to websites using the company's Quantcast Choice consent management platform were giving consent to at least some use of cookies. About 81% were
-
In 2018, Wells Fargo disclosed that due to a computer bug that remained undiscovered for nearly five years 600 customers were granted more expensive mortgage loans than they could have qualified for. About 400 of them went on to lose their homes. The announcement reignited the public anger and
-
In August 2018 Amazon rolled out a software update to Fire OS 5, the operating system used by older versions of its Fire TV and Fire TV Stick devices to counteract malware. At risk were versions of the devices before the company released Fire OS 6 whose owners had turned on Android Debug Bridge in
-
Semi-autonomous cars with built-in internet connections are increasingly being delivered with location tracking in place. Marketed as a convenience, the app FordPass links to Ford's Sync Infotainment system and can log frequent and recently visited locations. Similarly, GM Onstar's Family Link
-
In August 2018, banks and merchants had begun tracking the physical movements users make with input devices - keyboard, mouse, finger swipes - to aid in blocking automated attacks and suspicious transactions. In some cases, however, sites are amassing tens of millions of identifying "behavioural
-
At the 2018 DefCon security conference, a researcher from the security firm Nuix presented the discovery that body cameras from five different manufacturers shoe cameras are in use by US law enforcement are vulnerable to remote digital attacks, some of which could manipulate footage so it could not
-
In what appears to be an extension of China's tracking of its Muslim citizens, 3,300 of the 11,500 Chinese pilgrims joining the 2018 hajj to Mecca were outfitted with GPS trackers. When photos were shown of the first group preparing to depart wearing trackers around their necks, the state-run
-
AirAsia engaged Palantir as a data science partner focused on “guest experience, inflight sales, route revenue, finance, security, flight operations, network planning, cargo, supply chain management, commercial and people development.” Publication: AirAsia newsroom Date: 8 August 2018
-
In 2018, the UK Information Commissioner's Office fined Emma's Diary, a site offering pregnancy and childcare advice owned by Lifecycle Marketing (Mother and Baby) Ltd, £140,000 for collecting and selling personal information belonging to more than 1 million people without disclosing in the site's
-
Under a clause in the country's computer crime act that criminalises uploading content that is false or causes "panic", in 2018, Thailand's ruling military junta pursued a criminal investigation into a live feed on the Facebook page belonging to the rising Future Forward Party. The postings claimed
-
Cookies and other tracking mechanisms are enabling advertisers to manipulate consumers in new ways. For $29, The Spinner will provide a seemingly innocent link containing an embedded cookie that will allow the buyer to deliver targeted content to their chosen recipient. The service advertises
-
The common reporting standard brought in by the UK's HMRC in 2018 require tax authorities to automatically exchange information on millions of citizens living abroad. In response, an EU citizen domiciled in Italy who formerly lived in the UK and maintains a UK bank account, filed a complaint with
-
By August 2018, the UK government's "hostile environment" policy, as set out in the 2014 and 2016 Immigration Acts and other measures, was extending the national border into the heart of services such as banking, education, health, and housing where landlords and staff have been forced to implement
-
In 2018 genetic testing companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe agreed on guidelines for sharing users' DNA data and handling police requests. The guidelines, which include easy-to-read privacy policies, were inspired by two incidents: one in which local investigators used the GEDmatch DNA comparison
-
In 2018, documents filed in a court case showed that a few days before the 2017 inauguration of US president Donald Trump - timing that may have been a coincidence - two Romanian hackers took over 123 of the police department's 187 surveillance cameras in Washington, DC with the intention of using
-
In 2018, the chair of the London Assembly's police and crime committee called on London's mayor to cut the budget of the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, which provides oversight, in order to pay for AI systems. The intention was that the efficiencies of adopting AI would free up officers'
-
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) used Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition software, to compare images of US lawmakers to a publicly available database of 25,000 mugshot photos. The ACLU’s study validated research that has shown that facial recognition technology is more likely to
-
By July 2018, ten-year-old Twitter had become such a frequent data resource for social scientists that estimates were that anyone who tweeted publicly on the service was part of a dataset somewhere. The ease and low cost of using Twitter have enabled studies such as analysing bot behaviour during
-
In this interview (podcast and transcript) Virginia Eubanks discuss three case studies from her book Automating Inequality to illustrate how technology and data collection negatively impact people in vulnerable situation. The (failed) attempt to automate and privatise the welfare system elligibility
-
In July 2018, a group of researchers at Northwestern University published the results of two years of studying the collaboration behaviour of tens of thousands of scientists. A controversy rapidly sprang up about the method they used: they had been given access to project folder-related data by the
-
In 2018, 17 US states and the District of Columbia filed suit to block the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Emails released as part of the lawsuit show that the administration began pushing to add the question as early as the beginning of 2017, claiming it was to improve
-
"Buzzer teams" - teams employed to amplify messages and create a buzz on social media - were used by all candidates in the 2017 Indonesian general elections. Coordinated via WhatsApp groups, many of the teams opened fake accounts to spread both positive and negative messages, as well as hate speech
-
Bluetooth utilizes a device pairing mechanism based on elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange to allow encrypted communication between devices. The ECDH key pair consists of a private and a public key, and the public keys are exchanged to produce a shared pairing key. The devices must
-
In July 2018, Facebook announced it was investigating whether the Boston-based company Crimson Hexagon had violated the company's policies on surveillance. Crimson Hexagon markets itself as offering "consumer insights". Its customers include a Russian non-profit with ties to the Kremlin, and
-
In July 2018, attackers broke into the SingHealth Singaporean government health database and stole names, addresses, and various other details of 1.5 million people who visited clinics between May 1, 2015 and July 4, 2018; however, the attackers did not gain access to most medical records with the
-
Britain's £11 billion plan to offer smart meters to all homes and businesses by the end of 2020 was based in part on claims that the meters would give consumers better information about the energy they were using and offer sophisticated variable rate charging as part of working to combat climate
-
In November 2018 New York City's housing committee ruled that Airbnb must turn over the addresses and host names that use its service to the city's Office of Special Enforcement as part of a crackdown on illegal operators. The hotel industry contended in a report earlier in the year that around two
-
In July 2018, Dutch researcher Foeke Postma discovered that Polar, the manufacturer of the world's first wireless heart rate monitor manufacturer, was exposing the heart rates, routes, dates, times, duration, and pace of exercises performed by individuals at military sites and at their homes via its
-
In 2018, the Berlin-based researcher Hang Do Thi Duc concluded after analysing more than 200 million public transactions made in 2017 that anyone can track the purchase history of a user of the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo. By accessing the data via an open API, Do Thi Duc was able to view the
-
In July 2018, Election Systems and Software (ES&S), long the top US manufacturer of voter machines, admitted in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that it had installed pcAnywhere remote access software and modems on a number of the election management systems it had sold between 2000 and 2006
-
In July 2018 the three-year-old payment system Revolut notified the UK's National Crime Agency and the Financial Conduct Authority that it had found evidence of money laundering on its system. From its beginnings as a prepaid credit card operator, Revolut had branched out into small business
-
In July 2018, a hacker attack exposed the personal data of millions of Spanish subscribers Telefónica's Movistar service. The data included identity and payment information, phone and national ID numbers, banks, and calling data. The cause was a basic programming error known as an "enumeration bug"
-
In July 2018, Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor appointed to look into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee by spearphishing staffers. The charges include
-
In July 2018 Walmart filed a patent on a system of sensors that would gather conversations between cashiers and customers, the rattle of bags, and other audio data to monitor employee performance. Earlier in 2018, Amazon was awarded a patent on a wristaband that would monitor and guide workers in
-
While not currently mandatory to access healthcare services, Aadhaar is however increasingly used in the health sector as well. In 2018, the health ministry had to issue a statement to clarify that Aadhaar was “desirable” but not a must to access a 5 rupee insurance cover for hospitalisation under
-
In 2018, British immigration officers demanded that the mothers of two children provide DNA samples in order to provide proof of paternity. The children both had British fathers and had previously been issued British passports, but their mothers were not UK citizens. In one case, the father had
-
In July 2018, the leader of a private Facebook group for women with the BRCA gene, which is associated with high breast cancer risk, discovered that a Chrome plug-in was allowing marketers to harvest group members' names and other information. The group was concerned that exposure might lead to
-
As part of an ongoing hacker vendetta against surveillance apps installed by abusive partners, in July 2018 a hacker targeted SpyHuman, an India-based company that offers software that monitors Android devices, claiming the software should be taken off the market. Once someone gains physical access
-
In 2018, economists Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business showed that national divisions are so entrenched that details of what Americans buy, do, and watch can be used to predict, sometimes with more than 90% accuracy, their politics, race, income
-
In July 2018, members of the Internal Security Organisation, Uganda's counterintelligence agency, raided South African telecommunications provider MTN's Uganda data centre in Mutundwe. In a letter to the police, MTN said the ISO kidnapped a data manager who worked for the contractor that ran the
-
In July 2018, members of the Internal Security Organisation, Uganda's counterintelligence agency, raided South African telecommunications provider MTN's Uganda data centre in Mutundwe. In a letter to the police, MTN said the ISO kidnapped a data manager who worked for the contractor that ran the
-
In a 2018 interview, the Stanford professor of organisational behaviour Michal Kosinski discussed his research, which included a controversial and widely debunked 2017 study claiming that his algorithms could distinguish gay and straight faces; a 2013 study of 58,000 people that explored the
-
Between May 18 and May 22, a bug in Facebook's system changed the settings on 14 million users' accounts so that newly posted updates they thought were private might have been made public instead. The company attributed the error to a mistake made in redesigning how the public parts of user profiles
-
The Tel-Aviv-based private intelligence firm Black Cube, which is largely staffed by former Israeli intelligence operatives, was involved in a campaign to attack NGOs and businessman-turned-philanthropist George Soros during Hungary's election campaign. Between December 2017 and March 2018, agents
-
In July 2018, researchers at the London-based security and mobile commerce firm Upstream Systems found that millions of cheap smartphones sold in developing countries lacking privacy protections come with pre-installed apps that harvest users' data for the purpose of targeting advertising and that
-
In 2018, military security officers from the Israeli Defence Force accused Hamas of loading fake World Cup and dating apps with malware and making them available via the Israeli version of the Google Play store in order to hack the mobile phones of Israeli soldiers. The apps were capable of
-
In July 2018 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it would fine Facebook £500,000, the maximum under the 1998 data protection law, for failing to safeguard its users' information and lacking transparency about how the data was harvested and used by others, specifically Cambridge
-
In 2018, the Spanish La Liga app was found to be using the microphone and GPS to clamp down on bars infringing copyright by broadcasting matches without paying. Granting the app the permissions it requests at installation to access the mic and GPS location allows it to turn on the mic at any time
-
On the night of June 23, 2016, as the polls closed Britain's Sky News broadcast what sounded like a concession statement from Nigel Farage, the leader of the campaign to leave the EU, plus a YouGov exit poll indicating that the country had voted to remain; over an hour later, Farage reiterated his
-
In 2018, the French company Criteo unveiled its new €20 million AI lab, dedicated to researching and developing machine learning. The company intends the lab to shape industry standards for measurement and best practices in this area, and lead the international conversation on responsible data use
-
In June 2018, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that the Florida-based data broker Exactis had exposed a comprehensive database containing nearly 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server. The 2TB of data appeared to include detailed information on millions of
-
During 2018, when US president Donald Trump operated a policy under which immigration officers separated families arriving at the border without documentation, there were a number of suggestions for using genetic testing to verify family relationships in the interests of reuniting them. After
-
Even after they move out, domestic abusers may retain control over their former residence via Internet of Things devices and the mobile phone apps that control them. Using those tools, abusers can confuse, intimidate, and spy upon their former spouses and partners. Lack of knowledge about how these
-
In an experiment conducted by Fabio Chiusi and Claudio Agosti during the 2018 election season and set out in detail in their report for Tactical Tech, the duo sought to investigate the Facebook algorithm that powers users’ news feed and the algorithm’s treatment of political content. One of the
-
In June 2018, a panel set up to examine the partnerships between Alphabet's DeepMind and the UK's NHS express concern that the revenue-less AI subsidiary would eventually have to prove its value to its parent. Panel chair Julian Huppert said DeepMind should commit to a business model, either non
-
In a systematic campaign over more than five years, Myanmar military used Facebook to covertly spread propaganda, mostly against the Rohynga, via accounts that appeared to be dedicated to pop stars and entertainment, turning the social media site into a tool for ethnic cleansing. Having garnered a
-
In June 2018, human rights and digital rights activists in Myanmar called on Facebook to raise its level of moderation of Burmese-language content in order to reduce hate speech, which they said was at high risk of sparking open violence. In Myanmar, decades of civil war and the end of military rule
-
In June 2018 Facebook announced it would install new controls to improve members' understanding of how companies targeted them with advertising, including letting them know if a data broker supplied the information. This was the second update to the company's policies in 2018; in March it attempted
-
In June 2018 Apple updated its app store policies to bar developers from collecting information from users' address books and selling it on. While some apps have a legitimate need to access users' contacts, collecting information unnecessarily is a common money-making tactic. How many apps were
-
In June 2018, Uber filed a US patent application for technology intended to help the company identify drunk riders by comparing data from new ride requests to past requests made by the same user. Conclusions drawn from data such as the number of typos or the angle at which the rider is holding the
-
In 2018, the British army used paid Facebook messages to target 16-year-olds around the day GCSE results were announced to suggest that an army career might still be open to them if their grades were sub-par. The move was criticised for targeting teenagers at their most vulnerable and stressed
-
Even after 2015, when Facebook said it had walled off user records from third parties, inside sources and court documents showed that the company went on maintaining a whitelist of companies that were allowed customised access to information about users' Friends, phone numbers, and a "friend link"
-
In June 2018, after privacy activists found security flaws in toys such as My Friend Cayla and others and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission opened an investigation into the problems of connected gadgets, Amazon, Walmart, and Target announced they would stop selling CloudPets. Made by Spiral
-
In 2018, a South Carolina woman realised her FREDI video baby monitor had been hacked when the camera began panning across the room to the spot where she breastfed her son. A 2015 study conducted by Rapid7 found that baby monitors have a number of vulnerabilities that are both easily exploited and
-
In 2014, a team of four Swedish and Polish researchers began scraping every comment and interaction from 160 public Facebook pages. By two years later, they had collected one of the largest sets of user data ever assembled from the social network; it enabled them to track the behaviour of 368
-
In June 2018, security researchers found that Google's smart speaker and home assistant, Google Home, and its Chromecast streaming device could be made to leak highly accurate location information because they failed to require authentication from other machines on their local network. The attack
-
The surveillance of benefits claimants does not happen only online. In the UK, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is known to be using CCTV footage of public buildings but also gyms and supermarkets to prove some benefits claimants are not actually disabled. Gym memberships are also being
-
Rising suspicion of benefits claimants in the UK led by 2018 to the Department of Work and Pensions' adoption of numerous surveillance tactics, including using social media postings, gym memberships, airport footage, and surveillance video from public buildings including supermarkets, to build cases
-
Amazon has been accused of treating its UK warehouse staff like robots. Between 2015 and 2018, ambulances were called out close to 600 times to Amazon’s UK warehouses. A Freedom of Information request to ambulance services from the GMB union revealed 115 call-outs to Amazon’s site in Rugeley, near
-
In 2018, a Duke University medical doctor who worked with Microsoft researchers to analyse millions of Bing user searches found links between some computer users' physical behaviours - tremors while using a mouse, repeated queries, and average scrolling speed - and Parkinson's disease. The hope was
-
In 2018, an investigation found that children as young as nine in Hong Kong were exposing their identities online via Tik Tok, the most-downloaded iPhone app for creating and sharing short videos. Both Tik Tok and its sibling app Musical.ly, which is popular in Europe, Australia, and the US and
-
In 2018, the digital marketing company Tell All Digital began marketing technology to personal injury law firms to enable them to send mobile ads to patients they know are waiting for treatment in an emergency room and for up to a month afterwards. The technology relies on geofencing, a technique
-
In 2018, a week before the General Data Protection Regulation came into force in the EU, Quantcast and several other publishing industry groups complained that Google in an open letter that Google was imposing GDPR risks on publishers and consumers. Under the system Google proposed for GDPR
-
In May 2018, the ACLU of Northern California obtained documents under a FOIA request showing that Amazon was essentially giving away its two-year-old Rekognition facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, Florida. Amazon defended the move by saying the technology has
-
In May 2018, UK-based security researcher Robert Wiggins discovered that the mobile app TeenSafe, marketed as a secure app for iOS and Android, was storing data it collected on servers hosted on Amazon's cloud without a password and openly accessible. The app lets parents monitor their children's
-
In May 2018, Google announced an AI system to carry out tasks such as scheduling appointments over the phone using natural language. A Duplex user wanting to make a restaurant booking, for example, could hand the task off to Duplex, which would make the phone call and negotiate times and numbers. In
-
In May 2018, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement abandoned the development of machine learning software intended to mine Facebook, Twitter, and the open Internet to identify terrorists. The software, announced in the summer of 2017, had been a key element of president Donald Trump's "extreme
-
In 2011, the US Department of Homeland Security funded research into a virtual border agent kiosk called AVATAR, for Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real-Time, and tested it at the US-Mexico border on low-risk travellers who volunteered to participate. In the following years, the
-
Three months after the 2018 discovery that Google was working on Project Maven, a military pilot program intended to speed up analysis of drone footage by automating classification of images of people and objects, dozens of Google employees resigned in protest. Among their complaints: Google
-
In May 2018, Facebook said that as part of its investigation into how Cambridge Analytica had abused personal data on the social network, it had investigated thousands of apps on its platform and suspended about 200 of them. The company said it was investigating further to identify every app that
-
In this piece Gavin Sheridan, transparency campaigner and CEO of legal intelligence company Vizlegal, argues for the need for a regulatory oversight to control the impact big tech companies and force them to be more transparent. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/13/ireland-abortion
-
Facebook ads purchased in May 2016 by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russian troll farm, urged users to install the FaceMusic app. When installed, this Chrome extension gained wide access to the users' Facebook accounts and web browsing behaviour; in some cases it messaged all the user's
-
In 2018, the Brazil-based Coding Rights' feminist online cybersecurity guide Chupadados undertook a study of four popular period-tracking apps to find which best protected user privacy. Most, they found, rely on collecting and analysing data in order to be financially viable. The apps track more
-
In May 2018, a report form Strathmore University's Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology (CIPIT) found that some staff at Kenya's Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission who were mandated to protect voter data made millions of Kenyan shillings by illegally selling
-
In May 2018, researchers in the US and China demonstrated that they could send commands that activate Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google Assistant but that are inaudible to the human ear. The researchers were able to make smartphones and smart speakers dial phone numbers and open websites; the
-
The US company Securus provides a cellphone tracking service that can locate almost any cellphone in the US within seconds by obtaining data from major carriers via a system used by marketers and other companies. In 2018, former Mississippi County, Missouri, sheriff Cory Hutcheson was charged in
-
In May 2018 Facebook announced it would partner with organisations in places such as Myanmar and South Sudan in order to develop more "context-specific" knowledge about how its platform is being abused to create real risks of harm and violence. In Myanmar, where telephone companies allowed Facebook
-
For US citizens who can access benefits, many states use electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, which function like debit cards, to distribute benefits. As of 2015, at least 37 states issued Temporary Assistance to Needy Families benefits, also known as welfare, through EBT cards. http://www.ncsl
-
In 2018, documents obtained by a public records request revealed that the Los Angeles Police Department required its analysts to maintain a minimum of a dozen ongoing surveillance targets identified using Palantir software and a "probable offender" formula based on an LAPD points-based predictive
-
Although the US rejected a "National Data Center" approach in 1966, eventually instead passing the 1974 Privacy Act, in 2018 the House of Representatives proposed a national database of all 40 million recipients of benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as
-
In 2018, based on an analysis of 270,000 purchases between October 2015 and December 2016 on a German ecommerce site that sells furniture on credit, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research found that variables such as the type of device could be used to estimate the likelihood that a
-
Following pressure from civil society and pro-abortion groups, Facebook announced on May 8th 208 a ban on foreign ads related to the Irish referendum on abortion. Facebook said they were being consistent with Irish electoral law. https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-bans-foreign
-
In its May 2018 quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Equifax provided its most detailed analysis to date of the company's 2017 data breach. In the US, nearly 147 million people had their names, dates of birth, and/or Social Security numbers stolen; address information was
-
Una Mullally writes about the online campaign led by the anti-abortion groups Protect the 8th and Undecided8 and their targeting of undecided voters in Ireland. She spoke to Facebook about their role in the spreading of those campaign and to campaigner Gavin Sheridan, who has demanded transparency
-
A 2018 law passed in Egypt requires ride-hailing services such as Uber and local competitor Careem to supply passenger data to the security agencies when requested to do so. More than 4 million people in Egypt have used Uber since it debuted there in 2014. While human rights advocates expressed
-
In May 2018, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it would investigate Police Scotland after Privacy International filed a complaint that offers' use of "cyber kiosks", which when connected to a device can view all its data, violated the Data Protection Act. Trials of the technology
-
In May 2018, Slice Technologies, which provides the free Unroll.me email management service in return for data-mining individuals' email inboxes, announced it would discontinue offering its service in Europe rather than comply with the incoming General Data Protection Regulation. Unroll.me's privacy
-
At the 2017 Champions League Final, South Wales Police deployed an automated facial recognition system that wrongly identified more than 2,000 people in Cardiff as potential criminals. The system's cameras watched 170,000 people arrive in Cardiff for the football match between Real Madrid and
-
The French company Criteo is struggling to conform to the requirements of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, which came into force in May 2018. Critics believed that Criteo's practice of opting visitors to European retail sites into first-party cookies and tracking even if they ignored the
-
In India, one of the reasons the Aadhaar ID system has been increasingly widely used is that it is mandatory for much India’s benefits system. Government subsidies are now processed through under the Direct Benefit Transfer scheme, which requires citizens to have a bank account and to insure that
-
In 2018, after the UK Cabinet Office said a trial of compulsory voter ID was necessary because reports of voter fraud had more than doubled between the 2014 and 2016 elections - a claim immediately disputed by a voter and upheld by the UK Statistics Authority. While it was true that there were 21
-
In 2018 industry insiders revealed that the gambling industry was increasingly turning to data analytics and AI to personalise their services and predict and manipulate consumer response in order to keep gamblers hooked. Based on profiles assembled by examining every click, page view, and
-
In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party's anti-corruption watchdog in southeastern Hefei in the Anhul province claimed in a social media post that its branch in a neighbouring city had retrieved deleted messages from a suspect's WeChat account. Tencent, WeChat's operator, denied that the company stored
-
For years, car manufacturers including Range Rover, BMW, and Volkswagen kept secret security risks in their vehicles' keyless entry systems that exposed hundreds of millions of car owners to the risk of theft from attackers using gadgets available online for £100. In March 2018, Range Rovers were
-
Police and blackmailers in Egypt are using gay dating apps like Grindr, Hornet, and Growlr to find targets tor arrest and imprisonment while the developers who can make changes are thousands of miles away and struggle to know what to change to protect their users. In a typical story, a target finds
-
The US Securities and Exchange Commission announced in April 2018 that it would fine Altaba, formerly known as Yahoo, $35 million for failing to disclose its massive 2014 data breach. Yahoo did not notify the hundreds of millions of customers until the end of 2016, when it was closing its
-
In December 2014 researchers at Malwarebytes discovered that for two months an Adobe Flash player zero-day exploit with a ransomware payload was embedded in online ads placed by a leading advertising network. The attack ended when Adobe patched Flash to close the vulnerability on February 2, 2015
-
In April 2018, the Austrian cabinet agreed on legislation that required asylum seekers would be forced to hand over their mobile devices to allow authorities to check their identities and origins. If they have been found to have entered another EU country first, under the Dublin regulation, they can
-
By 2018, Palantir, founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel to supply tools for finding obscure connections by analysing a wide range of data streams to the Pentagon and the CIA for the War on Terror, was supplying its software to the US Department of Health and Human Services to detect Medicare fraud, to the
-
In a talk at the 2018 Wall Street Journal CEO Council Conference, Darktrace CEO Nicole Eagan gave as an example of the new opportunities afforded by the Internet of Things a case in which attackers used a thermometer in a lobby aquarium to gain a foothold in a casino's network and exfiltrate the
-
In April 2018, Facebook announced that in six months it would end a programme it called "Partner Categories", in which the social network acted as a bridge between data brokers like Acxiom, Epsilon, and TransUnion and the consumers their customers want to reach. In this deal, Facebook did not
-
A 2016 Privacy International report on Syrian state surveillance found that between 2007 and 2012 the Assad regime spent millions of dollars on building a nationwide communications monitoring system. By 2012, this surveillance capability helped the Syrian government target and murder journalists
-
In late 2018, after apps like Strava and Polar Flow exposed the movements of staff around military bases, the US Department of Defense banned military troops and other workers at sensitive sites from using fitness trackers and other apps that could reveal their users' location. Military leaders will
-
In the United States, monitoring efforts to combat public benefits fraud are often part of a broader approach that focuses on stigmatizing people receiving benefits and reducing their number, rather than ensuring that the maximum number of people who are eligible receive benefits. However, fraud
-
The body of a 57-year-old was found in the laundry room of her home in Valley View, Adelaide, in September 2016. Her daughter-in-law who was in the house at the time of the murder claimed that she was tied up by a group of men who entered the house and managed to escape when they left. However, the
-
In 2016, researchers discovered that the personalisation built into online advertising platforms such as Facebook is making it easy to invisibly bypass anti-discrimination laws regarding housing and employment. Under the US Fair Housing Act, it would be illegal for ads to explicitly state a
-
In April 2018, a researcher at Norway's SINTEF found that the gay-daring app Grindr was sending its 3.6 million users' HIV status and last tested date along with their GPS data, phone ID, and email to two app-optimising companies, Apptimize and Localytics. SINTEF also found that the company was
-
The Sunday edition of the national newspaper Bild reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) party and the centre-right Free Democrats (FDP) party purchased "more than a billion" pieces of personal data about potential voters from a subsidiary of Deutsche Post
-
By 2018, gene studies involving more than 200,000 test takers had found correlations between 500 human genes and academic success. Based on these results, the behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin claimed that parents would be able to use consumer tests to enable "precision education", built around
-
Behind the colourful bicycles and games rooms, Silicon Valley tech giants operate a strict code of secrecy, relying on a combination of cultural pressure, digital and physical surveillance, legal threats, and restricted stock to prevent and detect not only criminal activity and intellectual property
-
Users downloading their Facebook histories have been startled to find that the company has been collecting call and SMS data. The company has responded by saying users are in control of what's uploaded to Facebook. However, the company also says it's a widely used practice when users first sign in
-
In March 2018, Indian Congress president Rahul Gandhi tweeted that the Naramendra Modi app issued by India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was leaking user data. The app is intended to spearhead BJP's social media strategy in the run-up to the 2019 general elections; the party hopes to use it to
-
In March 2018, Facebook announced it was scrapping plans to show off new home products at its developer conference in May, in part because revelations about the use of internal advertising tools by Cambridge Analytica have angered the public. The new products were expected to include connected
-
Affiliate marketers, who buy ad space in bulk, run campaigns, and earn commissions on the sales they generate, are behind some of the shady and misleading ads that pollute social media and the wider internet, despite also promoting some legitimate businesses such as Amazon and eBay. At one of
-
In March 2018, a security researcher discovered that the state-owned utility company Indane had access to the Aadhaar database via an API, but they did not secure this way of entry. As a result, anybody was able to use this service to access details on the Aadhaar database about any Aadhaar number
-
According to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, during the 2014 US midtern elections, Cambridge Analytica, needing data to complete the new products it had promised to political advisor Steve Bannon, harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their
-
In 2015, Facebook removed a feature that had been in place for some years that allowed developers to access information about Friends who had also signed up for their app. During that time, about 270,000 people downloaded and installed an app that was portrayed as part of an online personality quiz
-
The small, portable GrayKey box, costing $15,000 for an internet-connected version tied to a specific location or $30,000 for an offline version usable anywhere, takes two minutes to install proprietary software designed to guess an iPhone's passcode. Intended for use by law enforcement officials
-
A 2018 study of the use of biometric technology for voter identification and verification in Ghana in 2012 called the effort a failure. It's not enough, the researchers argue, for biometrics to be technically sound; for the technology to function as intended registration centres must have real-time
-
In March 2018, Trever Feden, the CEO of a property management startup, exposed a flaw in the gay-dating app Grindr that opened access to the location data and other information about its more than 3 million daily users. A website Faden set up allowed Grindr users to see who was blocking them after
-
As part of efforts to tone down street fights at night Statumseind in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the city has deployed technology: wifi trackers, cameras, and microphones attached to lamp posts detect aggressive behaviour and alert police. The data collected by these sensors is used to profile
-
A data breach at the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm at the centre of Russia's interference in the 2016 US presidential election, reveals that one way the IRA operated was to use identities stolen from Americans. Using these accounts and other fake ones, the troll farm interacted
-
In February 2018 Uber and the city of Cincinnati, Ohio announced the Cincinnati Mobility Lab, a three-year-partnership that will allow the city and the surrounding area in northern Kentucky to use Uber data for transport planning. Cincinnati, like many cities, is anxious to identify the impact of
-
As part of its attempt to keep its 40,000 drivers operating on the streets of London after Transport for London ruled in October 2017 it was not "fit and proper" to run a taxi service, Uber has promised to share its anonymised data on travel conditions and journey times. TfL said in February 2018
-
Recruiters are beginning to incorporate emotional recognition technology into the processes they use for assessing video-based job applications. Human, a London-based start-up, claims its algorithms can match the subliminal facial expressions of prospective candidates to personality traits. It then
-
The Houston, Texas-based online dating startup Pheramor claims to use 11 "attraction genes" taken from DNA samples in its matchmaking algorithm. Launched in February 2018 in Houston with 3,000 users, Pheramor also encourages users to connect it to their social media profiles so it can datamine them
-
Under a secret deal beginning in 2012, the data mining company Palantir provided software to a New Orleans Police Department programme that used a variety of data such as ties to gang members, criminal histories, and social media to predict the likelihood that individuals would commit acts of
-
A former Facebook insider explains to Wired Magazine why it's almost certain that the Trump campaign's skill using the site's internal advertising infrastructure was more important in the 2016 US presidential election than Russia's troll farm was. The first was the ads auction; the second a little
-
In 2017, Facebook introduced two mechanisms intended to give users greater transparency about its data practices: the "why am I seeing this?" button users can click to get an explanation of why they're being shown a particular ad, and an Ad Preferences page that shows users a list of attributes the
-
In 2018, pending agreement from its Institutional Review Board, the University of St Thomas in Minnesota will trial sentiment analysis software in the classroom in order to test the software, which relies on analysing the expressions on students' faces captured by a high-resolution webcam
-
In February 2018 the Home Office gave the Yorkshire Police 250 scanners that use a smartphone app to run mobile fingerprint checks against the UK's criminal fingerprint and biometrics database (IDENT1) and the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System (IABS). The app was simultaneously made available
-
In 2018, Tapad announced a partnership with Twine Data intended to integrate Tapad's probabilistic cross-device tracking capability with Twine's deterministic identity graph. The two companies intend to create one of the largest portable identity graph and customer relationship management onboarding
-
In February 2019 Google engineers announced that they had created faster, more efficient encryption system that could function on less-expensive Android phones that were too low-powered to implement existing full-device encryption. The scheme, known as Adiantum, uses established and well-vetted
-
In February 2018, police in China began using connected sunglasses equipped with facial recognition to scan crowds looking for suspected criminals. In a test at a busy train station in the city of Zhengzhou, police were able to identify and apprehend seven suspects accused of crimes ranging from hit
-
In this interview with Virginia Eubanks, the author highlights how electronic benefit transfer cards have become tracking devices and how data exploitation used to restrict access to welfare. https://www.vox.com/2018/2/6/16874782/welfare-big-data-technology-poverty Author: Sean Illing Publication
-
In 2019, after five years of acquisitions and billions of dollars in investment in advertising software and real-time tracking of web users, Oracle, facing questions about the practices of Data Cloud, its advertising software division, began laying off staff. The reason may have been partly
-
Amazon, which is already known for closely monitoring its warehouse workers has been granted two US patents on a wristband that could use ultrasonic sound pujlses and radio transmissions track a worker's every move, pause, or fidget, and vibrate to provide haptic feedback to nudge them when they
-
In 2018, Tapad announced it would offload its media business to Brand Networks, refocusing instead on its data business and identity products, primarily its cross-device graph. A particular target for its new focus was the telecommunications industry, starting with Telenor, which acquired Tapad in
-
As a gift in 2012, the Chinese government built the African Union's $200 million Addis Ababa headquarters, where African ministers and heads of state meet twice a year to discuss major continental issues. In 2017, Le Monde Afrique discovered that the building's computer systems incorporated an
-
In November 2017, San Francisco-based Strava, maker of a GPS-enabled fitness app, published a heat map showing the activity of all its 27 million users around the world. Upon outside examination, the data visualisation, which was built from 1 billion activities and 3 trillion data points covering 27
-
In 2018, Quantcast began expanding into Asia, opening operations in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. The company explained the move was part of a market "tipping point", in which AI would transform every customer experience, company, and industry
-
In January 2018, internet users began complaining about a new wave of pop-up ads across the web: hard-to-close, misleading, and malicious, some of them making it impossible for people to read news. While many blamed reputable publishers like the New York Times and the Atlantic for being willing to
-
Modern vehicles are networks of sophisticated computers on wheels that can collect more intimate data about ourselves and our lives than smartphones do. The agreements covering nearly every new vehicle that is leased or sold in the US often now include a clause permitting the manufacturer to monitor
-
Police investigating the 2016 rape and murder of a 19-year-old medical student were unable to search the iPhone of suspect Hussein Khavari, an Afghan refugee who declined to give them his password. The investigators gained access to the phone via a private company in Munich, and went through Apple's
-
A 19-year-old medical student was raped and drowned in the River Dresiam in October 2016. The police identified the accused by a hair found at the scene of the crime. The data recorded by the health app on his phone helped identify his location and recorded his activities throughout the day. A
-
In 2017, a study claimed to have shown that artificial intelligence can infer sexual orientation from facial images, reviving the kinds of claims made in the 19th century about inferring character from outer appearance. Despite widespread complaints and criticisms, the study, by Michal Kosinski and
-
As of early 2018, Facebook's friends recommendations (People You May Know) are based on the address books users give them. However, Facebook has been filing patent applications for a new generation of technologies for collecting more information about its users and matching them more accurately. One
-
In this review of Virginia Eubanks's book Automating Inequality, the author of the review looks at the three main case studies Eubanks explores in her book: the attempt to automate and privatise the welfare system elligibility management in the state of Indiana in 2006, the use of a coordinated
-
In November 2016, the security contractor Krytowire discovered that cheap Chinese Android phones often include pre-installed software that monitors users' locations, messaging, and contacts, and sends the gathered information to China every 72 hours. Shanghai Adups Technology Company, the Chinese
-
In January 2018, journalists found that, for 500 rupees (around $7USD), they were able to buy on WhatsApp access to a gateway that allowed them to access the personal details connected to any of the entries on the Aadhaar database - by entering any Aadhaar number, they could see details like the
-
EU antitrust regulators are studying how companies gather and use big data with a view to understanding how access to data may close off the market to smaller, newer competitors. Among the companies being scrutinised are the obvious technology companies, such as Google and Facebook, and less obvious
-
In a letter accompanying his annual report to the Prime Minister for 2017, the British Interception of Communications Commissioner, Stanley Burnton, has expressed concern about the increasingly unacceptable number of errors police are making in resolving Internet Protocol addresses. Because of the
-
In February 2018 the Canadian government announced a three-month pilot partnership with the artificial intelligence company Advanced Symbolics to monitor social media posts with a view to predicting rises in regional suicide risk. Advanced Symbolics will look for trends by analysing posts from 160