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Content Type: News & Analysis
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Political campaigns around the world have turned into sophisticated data operations. They rely on data- your data- to facilitate a number of decisions: where to hold rallies, which States or constituencies to focus resources on, which campaign messages to focus on in which area, and how to target supporters, undecided voters, and non-supporters.
While data driven political campaigns are not new, the granularity of data available and the potential power to sway or suppress voters through that…
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: Video
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Watch our video primer (1m54s) on how political advertisers use highly detailed data about you to target political adverts at you.
Read about some simple steps you can take to minimise the amount of political ads you see online and questions you can be asking of those that profit from your data.
Content Type: News & Analysis
Thursday, May 7, 2020
As parts of the world are preparing to go back to factories, offices, and other workplaces, or in the case of Amazon, trying to make continually unsafe workplaces less hazardous, we must be on the watch yet again for profiteering, data-grabs, and surveillance as a solution to an undefined problem.
Many of the measures are predicated on the idea of catching employees who are sick. But, why do employers think that employees are or will lie about their health? Is it because they love their jobs…
Content Type: Impact Case Study
Wednesday, May 2, 2018
What happened
As we traveled the world we saw alarming use and spread of surveillance capabilities. From country to country we saw the same policy ideas, and the same kit. The role of industry to the growth of surveillance capability had never been exposed before.
What we did
In 1996 we published the first ‘Big Brother Incorporated’ study, identifying the vast numbers of technology firms who were investing in surveillance technologies. We were particularly surprised by the rise of German…
Content Type: Long Read
Thursday, May 7, 2020
This week saw the release of a coronavirus tracking app within the United Kingdom, initially to be trialled in the Isle of Wight. Privacy International has been following this closely, along with other ‘track and trace’ apps like those seen in over 30 other countries.
The UK’s app is no different. It is a small part of a public health response to this pandemic. As with all the other apps, it is vital that it be integrated with a comprehensive healthcare response, prioritise people, and…
Content Type: Long Read
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
IMAGE SOURCE: "My Phone Bought This" by oliver t is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
LAST UPDATE: 14th January 2021
Mandatory SIM card registration laws require people to provide personal information, including a valid ID or even their biometrics, as a condition for purchasing or activating a SIM card. Such a requirement allows the state to identify the owner of a SIM card and infer who is most likely making a call or sending a message at any given time.
SIM card registration undermines…
Content Type: Explainer
Sunday, May 24, 2020
Social media platforms are a vast trove of information about individuals, including their personal preferences, political and religious views, physical and mental health and the identity of their friends and families.
Social media monitoring, or social media intelligence (also defined as SOCMINT), refers to the techniques and technologies that allow the monitoring and gathering of information on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter which provides valuable intelligence to others…
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: Press release
Monday, January 6, 2020
A large number of apps on smart phones store data in the cloud. Law enforcement can access these vast troves of data from devices and from popular apps with the push of a button using cloud extraction technology.
Mobile phones remain the most frequently used and most important digital source for law enforcement investigations. Yet it is not just what is physically stored on the phone that law enforcement are after, but what can be accessed from it, primarily data stored in the Cloud. …
Content Type: Video
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Immediately following the UK general election in December 2019, we worked with Open Rights Group to commission a YouGov poll about public understanding and public opinion about the use of data-driven campaigning in elections.
The poll used a representative sample of 1,664 adults across the UK population.
'Data-driven political campaigning' is about using specific data about you to target specific messages at you. So, for this might involve knowing that you are, for example, likely to have…
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: Press release
Thursday, June 18, 2020
Today, the ICO has issued a long-awaited and critical report on Police practices regarding extraction of data from people's phones, including phones belonging to the victims of crime.
The report highlights numerous risks and failures by the police in terms of data protection and privacy rights. The report comes as a result of PI’s complaint, dating back to 2018, where we outlined our concerns about this intrusive practice, which involves extraction of data from devices of victims, witnesses…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Monday, December 16, 2019
In the run up to the UK General Election on 12 December 2019, Privacy International, joined by other organisations called on political parties to come clean about their use of data. The lack of response to these demands combined with other evidence gathered by groups during the run up to the election demonstrates that current regulations are not fit for the digital era.
This briefing to which Privacy International contributed together with Demos, the Computational Propaganda Project at the…
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: Report
Thursday, February 6, 2020
The changes discussed in this article are based on a second analysis performed in late November, 3 months after the original study Your Mental Health is for Sale and following the exact same methodology. All data collected can be found at the bottom of this page.
Change is possible
Back in September 2019 we published the report Your Mental Health is for Sale exposing how a majority of the top websites related to mental health in France, Germany and the UK share data for advertising purposes.…
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…
Content Type: Case Study
Thursday, June 6, 2019
In 2030 Amtis finds a future where property rights for data were adopted. Here’s how this future plays out:
My data, my turf. This was the first graffiti I saw as I was walking down the street and I said to myself, “Yeah, big corp, we’re going to get you good!”. I am fed up with companies making insane amounts of money from my data. If this is the game we’re playing, I want my fair share.
I was not the only one thinking like this. A few years back there was a strong push towards adopting…
Content Type: Advocacy
Monday, June 29, 2020
The entire election cycle is increasingly data dependent. This is particularly the case with political campaigns which are ever more digital and data driven. This campaign environment presents novel challenges due to the scale and range of data available together with the multiplicity, complexity and speed of profiling and targeting techniques. All of this is characterised by its opacity and lack of accountability. Existing legal frameworks designed to curtail this exploitation often also fall…
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: 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: Explainer
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
In a scramble to track, and thereby stem the flow of, new cases of Covid-19, Governments around the world are rushing to track the locations of their populace. One way to do this is to write a smartphone app which uses Bluetooth technology, and encourage (or mandate) that individuals download and use the app. We have seen such examples in Singapore and emerging plans in the UK.
Apps that use Bluetooth are just one way to track location. There are several different technologies in a smartphone…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Cloud extraction allows law enforcement agencies to take huge amounts of your data from the Cloud via a legal back door. If law enforcement seize your phone or take it from a victim of crime, they can extract tokens or passwords from the device which lets them get access to data from apps such as Uber, Instagram, Slack, Gmail, Alexa and WhatsApp.
In so doing, law enforcement agencies can avoid official channels through cloud companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. There is no check on…
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: 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: Call to Action
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
You should know what new technologies police are deploying on your local community. We want to find out if UK police are using cloud extraction tech, what law exists to protect your rights and what safeguards are in place. We need your help.
See our new report for more info on cloud extraction
If you are not based in the UK but have a FOIA regime in your country you can still use our template text below and check if there is a FOIA platform to use here to send it in your own country.…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
Send a Freedom of Information Request to your local police for to see if they are using cloud extraction here.
On 12 December 2018 a member of Lancashire Police Department UK told viewers of a Cellebrite webinar that they were using Cellebrite's Cloud Analyser to obtain cloud based 'evidence'. In response to a Freedom of Information request Hampshire Constabulary told Privacy International they were using Cellebrite Cloud Analyser.
They are not alone. In Cellebrite's 2019 Annual Trend Survey…