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Content Type: Explainer
Monday, August 5, 2019
Recently the role of social media and search platforms in political campaigning and elections has come under scrutiny. Concerns range from the spread of disinformation, to profiling of users without their knowledge, to micro-targeting of users with tailored messages, to interference by foreign entities, and more. Significant attention has been paid to the transparency of political ads - what are companies doing to provide their users globally with meaningful transparency into how they're being…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, April 3, 2019
PI has today written to Google, Instagram, Snapchat, TicTok, Twitter, YouTube, and WhatsApp to ask for more information about their steps to tell people why they are seeing ads. Facebook recently announced expanding the company's ad transparency measures to include more information about why an ad or content appears in a user's newsfeed. While Facebook has a lot more to do, it is important that all technology companies provide advertising transparency.
Recently, we have seen how platforms…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
Privacy shouldn’t be a luxury.
Google claim to agree with us - we know that because Sundar Pichai, their CEO, said so this May in the New York Times. And yet, Google are enabling an ecosystem that exploits people who own low-cost phones.
Today we, along with over 50 organisations including Amnesty International, DuckDuckGo, and the ACLU are asking Google to step up, and we’re asking you to join us in pressuring them to do the right thing.
Sign the petition
Google has the power to…
Content Type: Press release
Monday, June 16, 2014
Britain’s top counter-terrorism official has been forced to reveal a secret Government policy justifying the mass surveillance of every Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Google user in the UK.
This disturbing policy was made public due to a legal challenge brought by Privacy International, Liberty, Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Pakistani organisation Bytes for All, and five other national civil liberties organisations[fn]Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Egyptian…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
On 22 January 2019 Google updated its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy for Europe.
The message is quite reassuring:
“Nothing about your experience in Google services will change. And nothing is changing in terms of your privacy settings, the way your data is processed, nor the purposes of its processing”.
Then it says: “However, if you don’t want to accept these changes in our terms and Privacy Policy, you can choose to stop using the applicable services.”
Simple. If you don’t like it,…
Content Type: Examples
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
In 2012, London Royal Free, Barnet, and Chase Farm hospitals agreed to provide Google's DeepMind subsidiary with access to an estimated 1.6 million NHS patient records, including full names and medical histories. The company claimed the information, which would remain encrypted so that employees could not identify individual patients, would be used to develop a system for flagging patients at risk of acute kidney injuries, a major reason why people need emergency care. Privacy campaigners…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Last month, within thirty seconds of the BBC publishing a quotation from me on the latest round of the nymwars and Google+, my phone rang. Caller ID indicated that it was someone I know who works at Google. "Had I said something wrong?" was my first thought. I quickly retraced in my mind what it was that I had said to the journalist; I had responded in the article that Google's recent announcement could be seen as positive but really it was a sidestepping of the larger challenge of identity…
Content Type: Long Read
Monday, September 21, 2020
An edited version of this article was originally published on the EDRi website in September 2020.Introduction
Monopolies, mergers and acquisitions, anti-trust laws. These may seem like tangential or irrelevant issues for privacy and digital rights organisations. But having run our first public petition opposing a big tech merger, we wanted to set out why we think this is an important frontier for people's rights across Europe and indeed across the world.
In June, Google notified the European…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
We found this image here.
Today, a panel of competition experts, headed by Professor Jason Furman, the former chief economic adviser of in the Obama administration, confirmed that tech giants, like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, do not face enough competition.
Significantly, the report finds that control over personal data by tech giants is one of the main causes preventing competition and ultimately innovation.
Privacy International's research has shown clear examples of…
Content Type: Long Read
Friday, May 17, 2019
CEOs of the big tech companies have all recently discovered the value of privacy. On Tuesday, 30 April 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, announced his future plans to make Facebook a "privacy-focused social platform". This was followed by Google's Sundar Pichai demand that “privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world.” Meanwhile, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, has described the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as "net-positive", while Apple had already positioned itself as the champion of…
Content Type: Advocacy
Thursday, April 23, 2020
Background
In February 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commenced an investigation into the proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google, which was originally announced in November 2019.
Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, in 2018, generated 85% of its $136.22 billion in revenue from delivering targeted advertisements, has a past of competition law infringements in the European Union. Fitbit is a company that produces and sells health tracking technologies and…
Content Type: Examples
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
A study describes the data transmitted to backend servers by the Google/Apple based contact tracing (GAEN) apps in use in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark and finds that the health authority client apps are generally well-behaved from a privacy point of view, although the Irish, Polish, Danish, and Latvian apps could be improved in this respect. However, the study also finds that the Google Play Services component of the apps contacts Google servers as often as every 20 minutes…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Monday, January 21, 2019
We found this image here.
In order for GDPR to be effective at protecting people's data, it must be implemented and enforced. Therefore, we are pleased to see that CNIL has taken action and issued Google a fine of €50 million based on complaints by NOYB and La Quadrature Du Net in May 2018. Despite numerous statements by Google that it takes the protection of people's data seriously, the decision demonstrates that they have a long way to go and that regulators will take action to hold…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Friday, October 2, 2020
On September 16, Google announced their intention to enforce a new "stalkerware" policy after a 15 day grace period ending on 1 October 2020.The policy change states that the Google Play Store will only host stalkerware apps that give "a persistent notification is displayed while the data is being transmitted."
In its announcement, Google defines stalkerware as "Code that transmits personal information off the device without adequate notice or consent and doesn't…
Content Type: Long Read
Thursday, October 3, 2019
An analysis of what Facebook, Google, and Twitter have done to provide users with political ad transparency as of September 2019. Our full analysis is linked below.
Recently the role of social media and search platforms in political campaigning and elections has come under scrutiny. Concerns range from the spread of disinformation, to profiling of users without their knowledge, to micro-targeting of users with tailored messages, to interference by foreign entities, and more. Significant…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Monday, January 13, 2020
Maddie Stone, formally a Senior reverse engineer and tech lead on the Android security team, shockingly revealed a number of examples of how pre-installed apps on Android devices can undermine users privacy and security in her BlackHat USA talk in August 2019. The video of the talk only recently became available to the public in late December 2019.
The apps in question come preloaded on a device when it is purchased and often can't be removed. Stone reveals a litany of abuses carried out by…
Content Type: Examples
Saturday, May 5, 2018
A report for the US National Academy of Sciences explains the methods used by a team of computer scientists to derive accurate, neighbourhood-level estimates of the racial, economic, and political characteristics of 200 US cities using the images collected by Google Street View in 2013 and 2014. The key element: the pictures captured of 22 million cars parked along or driving down those streets. The scientists trained a computer algorithm to recognise the make, model, and year of each…
Content Type: Advocacy
Friday, July 24, 2020
Introduction
In February 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commenced an investigation into the proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google, which was originally announced in November 2019.
In March 2020, we made a submission to the ACCC, arguing that the acquisition would very likely have onerous implications for both consumers and markets. We asked the Australian regulator to apply strict scrutiny and not let hisory once again repeat itself. We concluded that the…
Content Type: Examples
Saturday, December 8, 2018
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 Internet Research Agency, a known Kremlin-linked troll farm; the ads appeared on the YouTube channels and websites belonging to CNN, CBS, Huffington Post, and the Daily Beast. The ads were approved in less…
Content Type: Examples
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
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 College London. The complaint notifies European regulators of a massive and ongoing data breach that affects virtually every user on the web.
Content Type: Examples
Monday, July 16, 2018
In July 2011, the established writer GrrlScientist tried to log into her Google account and found that it was suspended, barring her access to Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Reader, and the newly launched social network Google+. It turned out that the reason was then when Google launched its Google+ social network in June 2011, it included among its terms and conditions a requirement to use "the name your friends, family, or co-workers call you". In July 2011, Google began suspending the…
Content Type: Long Read
Friday, May 1, 2020
Photo by Cade Roberts on Unsplash
For those of you who don't spend the most productive part of your day scanning the news for developments about data and competition, here's what has been going on in the UK since summer 2019.
Basically, the UK competition authority started an investigation into online platforms and digital advertising last summer, and issued their preliminary findings in December 2019, concluding that Facebook and Google are very powerful in the search engine and social media…
Content Type: Examples
Friday, October 26, 2018
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 compliance, Google would impose limits on the number of technical vendors publishers could work with, thereby limiting innovation and competition, had yet to commit to joining the IAB Europe's Transparency…
Content Type: Press release
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
On 15 June 2020, Google formally notified the European Commission of its proposed acquisition of Fitbit, enabling them to capture a massive trove of sensitive health data that will expand and entrench its digital dominance. Privacy International is calling on EU regulators to block the merger.
In November 2019, Google announced its plan to acquire Fitbit, a company that produces and sells health tracking technologies and wearables - including smartwatches, health trackers and smart scales -…
Content Type: Video
Monday, February 10, 2020
Find out why 53 organisations from all over the world are telling Google it's time they take action on pre-installed apps (bloatware).
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast where ever you normally find your podcasts:
Spotify
Apple podcasts
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Castbox
Overcast
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Youtube
Music by Glass Boy, find more of their work here: glassboy.bandcamp.com/album/enjoy
(creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/)
Content Type: Video
Friday, June 26, 2020
Gus talks to two of PI's lawyers - Ailidh and Ioannis - to find out why we're telling the EU commission to block the merger.
Find out more and sign the petition at: pvcy.org/notwatch
Music: Last Chance Saloon by Sepia
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast where ever you normally find your podcasts:
Spotify
Apple podcasts
Google podcasts
Castbox
Overcast
Pocket Casts
Peertube
Youtube
Stitcher
and more...
Content Type: Press release
Saturday, April 17, 2004
The global watchdog Privacy International has today simultaneously filed complaints against Google's controversial Gmail service with privacy regulators in sixteen countries.
The move creates Google's biggest challenge yet in the short but turbulent public debate over its new email service.
Complaints have been filed with the privacy and data protection regulators of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Poland,…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, June 24, 2020
Name: Google/Fitbit mergerAge: GestatingAppearance: A bit dodgy. One of the world’s biggest tech giants, trying to purchase a company that makes fitness tracking devices, and therefore has huge amounts of our health data.I don’t get it. Basically Google is trying to buy Fitbit. As if Google doesn’t already have enough data about us, it now wants huge amounts of health data too.Oh, Fitbit, that’s that weird little watch-type-thing that people get for Christmas, wear for about a month while they…
Content Type: Examples
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
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, the complainants in Ireland, Poland, and the UK, have also filed new evidence today with the national data protection authorities of Ireland, Poland, and the United Kingdom, that reveals how ad…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Back in January, Privacy International and over 50 other organisations wrote to Google asking the company to take action over pre-installed apps that cannot be deleted (often known as “bloatware”), which can leave users vulnerable to their data being collected, shared and exposed without their knowledge or consent. Thousands of people from over 50 countries signed our petition supporting this ask. We welcome the constructive conversations we had with Google following this campaign and for the…