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Content Type: News & Analysis
After almost 20 years of presence of the Allied Forces in Afghanistan, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in February 2020 on the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. A few weeks before the final US troops were due to leave Afghanistan, the Taliban had already taken control of various main cities. They took over the capital, Kabul, on 15 August 2021, and on the same day the President of Afghanistan left the country.
As seen before with regime…
Content Type: Case Study
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 image based sexual abuse (more commonly known as revenge porn): Chrissy Chambers. Chrissy was 18 years old when her boyfriend convinced her to spend…
Content Type: Case Study
The right to privacy is crucial to protect a couple’s equal rights within marriage.
The recent rise of spyware as an “off-the-shelf” product that anyone can purchase has been extremely worrying, as installing spyware on someone else’s phone means getting access to their contacts, their messages, their google searches, their location and more - all without them knowing.
Spyware is, increasingly, becoming another way for abusive spouses to control and monitor their partners. Nearly a third of…
Content Type: Explainer
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: Case Study
The increasing deployment of highly intrusive technologies in public and private spaces such as facial recognition technologies (FRT) threaten to impair our freedom of movement. These systems track and monitor millions of people without any regulation or oversight.
Tens of thousands of people pass through the Kings Cross Estate in London every day. Since 2015, Argent - the group that runs the Kings Cross Estate - were using FRT to track all of those people.
Police authorities rushed in secret…
Content Type: News & Analysis
This op-ed originally appeared on the Atlantic Council's Disinfo Portal.
While these concerns are held by societies globally, Privacy International’s (PI) recent analysis shows that in jurisdictions where companies have been under pressure to act—by governments and institutions such as the EU, or civil society—they have adopted self-regulatory practices. But they have failed to apply this heightened transparency elsewhere.
The role of social media and search engine companies in…
Content Type: Long Read
Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
Digital identity providers
Around the world, we are seeing the growth of digital IDs, and companies looking to offer ways for people to prove their identity online and off. The UK is no exception; indeed, the trade body for the UK tech industry is calling for the development of a “digital identity ecosystem”, with private companies providing a key role. Having a role for private companies in this sector is not necessarily a problem: after all, …