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Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
This month, the Aspen Card - the debit payment card given to asylum seekers that PI has previously exposed as a de facto surveillance tool - will be outsourced to a new company. The contract with Sodexo has come to an end and the company Prepaid Financial Services will be taking over.
As a result of our campaign, the Home Office wrote a response that we have found wholly inadequate and raising more questions than answers. You can read more about the Home Office's response here.
While we still…
Content Type: Report
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Human rights defenders across the world have been facing increasing threats and harms as result of the use of digital and technological tools used by governments and companies which enable the surveillance, monitoring and tracking of individuals and communities. They are continuously at risk of violence, intimidation and surveillance as a direct consequence of the work they do. Such surveillance has been shown to lead to arbitrary detention, sometimes to torture and possibly to extrajudicial…
Content Type: Long Read
Sunday, February 14, 2021
In May 2019, the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – the department in charge of welfare – published their two-part staff guide on conducting fraud investigations. Privacy International went through the 995 pages to understand how those investigations happen and how the DWP is surveilling benefits claimants suspected of fraud.
Anyone who has flipped through a tabloid will have seen articles exposing the so-called “benefits-cheats,” people who allegedly trick the benefits systems for…
Content Type: Long Read
Sunday, February 14, 2021
Back in 2019, we read through a 1000-page manual released by the UK Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) describing how they conduct investigations into alleged benefits fraud. While out in the open and accessible to anyone, the guide turned out to be a dizzying dive into a world where civil servants are asked to stand outside someone’s door to decide if they are indeed single or disabled and have to be reminded that living together as a married couple is not an offense. The guide – which…
Content Type: Advocacy
Thursday, January 28, 2021
This letter is also available in Spanish.
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Pichai,
In the past few years, you have pioneered important transparency tools to help your platform users understand, learn about and contextualise the political advertising they see. We agree that advertiser verification processes and ad repositories are key safeguards against online manipulation and misinformation. However, we are saddened to observe that these benefits have not been equally distributed among your global…
Content Type: Report
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
Privacy International has released a report summarising the result of its research into the databases and surveillance tools used by authorities across the UK’s borders, immigration, and citizenship system.
The report uses procurement, contractual, and other open-source data and aims to inform the work of civil society organisations and increase understanding of a vast yet highly opaque system upon which millions of people rely.
It also describes and maps how arms and tech companies, ranging…
Content Type: Long Read
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Among the many challenges of 2020, the impact on elections around the world kept us all on the edge of our seats. 75 countries postponed national and local elections due to Covid 19. Of the elections that went ahead, we saw Covid safe measures at polling stations (South Korea led the way forward in April) an increase in postal voting (who can forget the USA, but also Poland) and political parties in Uganda conducting "virtual" campaigns as mass rallies and in person campaign meetings were…
Content Type: Long Read
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Political parties depend on data to drive their campaigns, from deciding where to hold rallies, which campaign messages to focus on in which area, and how to target supporters, undecided voters and non-supporters, including with ads on social media. Political parties increasingly hire private companies to do the bulk of this work, and our primary concern is how these companies use personal data to “profile” people and drive election campaigning.
As part of PI’s programme of work on Defending…
Content Type: Long Read
Friday, January 15, 2021
This report is available in English.
La mayoría de los documentos nacionales de identidad y demás documentos emitidos por autoridades estatales incluyen un marcador de género. Estos marcadores suelen recibir el nombre de “marcador de sexo” aunque este término no sea preciso. La presencia de dichos marcadores, especialmente en los certificados de nacimiento, promueve el énfasis de nuestra sociedad en el género como criterio de asignación de identidades, roles y responsabilidades sociales. Al…
Content Type: Long Read
Friday, January 15, 2021
Este informe está disponible en español.
Most national ID or identifying documents include a gender marker. This is often known as a 'sex marker,' even though the term is inaccurate. The presence of such markers, especially on birth certificates, contribute to our society’s emphasis on gender as a criterion for assigning identities, roles and responsibilities within society. With gender being such a determining and dominant identifier, it puts it at the centre of so many arrays of our lives…
Content Type: Long Read
Thursday, December 17, 2020
As we see Covid-19 vaccination programmes beginning around the world, for the first time since the start of the pandemic there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel as the fruition of truly unrivalled global scientific efforts has given us hope of saving lives, reopening our societies, and going back to “normal”.
This great moment of hope must not be seen opportunistically as yet another data grab. The deployment of vaccines, and in particular any “immunity passport” or certificate…
Content Type: Long Read
Friday, December 4, 2020
In 2019, we exposed the practices of five menstruation apps that were sharing your most intimate data with Facebook and other third parties. We were pleased to see that upon the publication of our research some of them decided to change their practices. But we always knew the road to effective openness, transparency, informed consent and data minimisation would be a long one when it comes to apps, which for the most part make profit from our menstrual cycle and even sometimes one’s desire to…
Content Type: Advocacy
Wednesday, December 2, 2020
Section 187 of the Data Protection Act read with Article 80 of the GDPR gives individuals the option to seek assistance from public interest non-profit organisations to take action against data controllers which have infringed their data rights. In this role, non-profit organisations may:
make complaints to the regulator on the individual’s behalf;
represent the individual in the courts when seeking a resolution of those complaints; and
bring legal claims against organisations they believe…
Content Type: Long Read
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
All around the world people rely on state support in order to survive. From healthcare, to benefits for unemployment or disability or pensions, at any stage of life we may need to turn to the state for some help. And tech companies have realised there is a profit to be made.
This is why they have been selling a narrative that relying on technology can improve access to and delivery of social benefits. The issue is that governments have been buying it. This narrative comes along with a…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Monday, November 16, 2020
An excerpt of this piece was first published in June 2020 in Adbusters, an international not-for-profit magazine produced by a global collective of artists and activists who want to 'shake up complacent consumer culture'.
Big oil. Big tobacco. Big pharma. How did we let ‘big tech’ happen? You would have thought humanity would learn its lesson. That nothing good comes of the mass accumulation and concentration of power into the hands of so few.
The internet was meant to be different. No one…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
The “EU Trust Fund for Stability and Addressing Root Causes of Irregular Migration and Displaced Persons in Africa” (EUTF for Africa) isn’t exactly headline news (and nor does it exactly roll off the tongue), but its influence is vast and will be felt for decades to come for millions of people across Africa.
Set up in the wake of the 2015 ‘migration crisis’ in Europe and largely made up of money earmarked for development aid (80% of its budget comes from development and humanitarian aid funds…
Content Type: Frequently Asked Questions
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
On 27 October 2020, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a report into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) - Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes.
After our initial reaction, below we answer some of the main questions regarding this report.
Content Type: Long Read
Thursday, October 15, 2020
As more and more of us feel compelled to cover our faces with masks, companies that work on facial recognition are confronted with a new challenge: how to make their products relevant in an era where masks have gone from being seen as the attribute of those trying to hide to the accessory of good Samaritans trying to protect others.
Facewatch is one of those companies. In May 2020, they announced they had developed a new form of facial recognition technology that allows for the…
Content Type: Video
Thursday, October 15, 2020
The two-minute video splices together clips of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, cleverly editing his speeches so that he mouths sentences such as:
'Coronavirus won’t affect you if your immunity passport’s blue'
'You can tell our technology’s going well, we’re running this whole thing in Excel'
'A mutant algorithm trick, when it goes wrong, the blame won’t stick'
'Our system’s world-beating at self-defeating'
'So when results are not forthcoming, don’t ask me, ask Dominic Cummings'
'It…
Content Type: Press release
Thursday, October 15, 2020
The new satirical video is a critique of the government's reliance on 'technological solutionism' in the fight against Coronavirus and increasingly across public services more widely, and their willingness to then scapegoat ‘mutant algorithms’ when their hopes for technological panaceas inevitably fail.
The two-minute video splices together clips of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, cleverly editing his speeches so that he mouths sentences such as:
'Coronavirus won’t affect you if your immunity…
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
Thursday, September 3, 2020
The Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) is a unified, common interface to a new mega-database currently being developed by the Home Office National Law Enforcement Data Programme (NLEDP). We believe that the development of the programme poses a threat to privacy and other rights and must be subjected to strong oversight, safeguards, and transparency measures.
As we explained in our analysis, the data in LEDS is vast, ever-increasing, worryingly mixes both evidential and intelligence material –…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
A new report by the UN Working Group on mercenaries analyses the impact of the use of private military and security services in immigration and border management on the rights of migrants, and highlights the responsibilities of private actors in human rights abuses as well as lack of oversight and, ultimately, of accountability of the system.
Governments worldwide have prioritised an approach to immigration that criminalises the act of migration and focuses on security.
Today, borders are not…
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…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Monday, August 17, 2020
In the last few weeks, the UK government has announced various new measures to ensure that crossings across the Channel were “inviable” including by appointing a new role of “clandestine Channel threat commander" and further plans to deploy the navy to stop migrants from crossing to the UK from France across the Channel. Premature plans it seems, as not only would such measures be contrary to the UK’s international obligations to allow individuals to seek asylum in the UK, but also since such…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Banning TikTok? It's time to fix the out-of-control data exploitation industry - not a symptom of it
Tuesday, August 4, 2020
Chinese apps and tech companies have been at the forefront of the news recently. Following India's ban of 59 chinese apps in July, President Trump announced his desire to ban TikTok, shortly followed by his backing of Microsoft's intention to buy the US branch of its parent company ByteDance. Other than others lip syncing his public declaration, what does President Trump fear from this app, run by a firm, based in China?
It's all about that data
One clear answer emerges: the exploitation of…
Content Type: Case Study
Friday, July 31, 2020
Numerous sexist, mysoginistic, homophobic and racist practices are flourishing online, in ways that are harder for national authorities to stop than when abuse takes place offline. One of these practices is ‘revenge pornography’, which involves online distribution of private sexual images without the consent of the person depicted.
One victim of ‘revenge pornography’, Chrissy Chambers, was 18 years old when her boyfriend convinced her to spend one last evening together before they took a break…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Monday, July 27, 2020
New technologies continue to present great risks and opportunities for any users but for some communities the implications and harms can have severe consequences and one of the sectors facing increasing challenges to keep innovating whilst protecting themselves and the people they serve is the humanitarian sector.
Over the course of engagement with the humanitarian sector, one of our key observations has been how risk assessments undertaken in the sector omitted to integrate a hollistic…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin together with Dr. Krisztina Huszti-Orbán, released today a key report on the “Use of Biometric Data to Identify Terrorists: Best Practice or Risky Business?”.
The report explores the human rights risks involved in the deployment of biometrics emphasising that
in the absence of robust rights protections which are institutionally embedded…
Content Type: Explainer
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Definition
An immunity passport (also known as a 'risk-free certificate' or 'immunity certificate') is a credential given to a person who is assumed to be immune from COVID-19 and so protected against re-infection. This 'passport' would give them rights and privileges that other members of the community do not have such as to work or travel.
For Covid-19 this requires a process through which people are reliably tested for immunity and there is a secure process of issuing a document or other…