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Content Type: Explainer
Introduction/Background
Electronic tags have been a key part of criminal justice offender management for over 20 years, being used in the United States since the mid 1980’s and in the UK and some other commonwealth countries since 2003. In 2021 the UK introduced GPS tagging for immigration bail.
The tag is predominantly used to curtail the liberties of individuals. For those on criminal bail its intended use includes managing return into communities while deterring reoffending.
As we explore…
Content Type: Long Read
Governments around the world are increasingly making registration in national digital ID systems mandatory for populations, justifying its need on a range of issues from facilitating access to services, to national security and fighting against corruption. This is an attempt to create a "foundational identity" for an individual, or "a single source of truth" about who someone is, according to a government agency. These identity systems are run by governments, sometimes by private companies, or…
Content Type: Long Read
Now more than ever with a global pandemic happening, our lives are being shaped by our interaction with the digital world. Work meetings on Zoom followed by Skype with family before a quick run with your favourite running app and a Google search for your next meal: technologies and services offer us a lot and greatly improve our daily lives. But what's the real cost of these tools we rely on so much?
A lot of these companies, especially those offering free services, collect data about you. It…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"An app that the UK’s governing party launched last year — for Conservative Party activists to gamify, ‘socialize’ and co-ordinate their campaigning activity — has been quietly pulled from app stores..."
"...We know the name of the Conservative Campaigner app’s supplier because this summer we raised privacy concerns about the app — on account of its use of uCampaign’s boilerplate privacy policy, if you clicked to read the app’s privacy policy earlier this year.
The wording…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the targeting of campaign ads — and whose chair, Damian Collins — is a member of the UK’s governing Conservative Party, contains one curious omission.
Among the many issues the report raises are privacy…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
""People with center-right views feel like the big social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, are not sympathetic to their views,” said Thomas Peters, the chief executive of uCampaign, a start-up in Washington that developed the N.R.A., Great America and Trump campaign apps. “It’s creating a safe space for people who share a viewpoint, who feel like the open social networks are not fun places for them.”
Sheltered from the broader public, however, the platforms can intensify…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"Ireland's two largest anti-abortion campaigns are facing questions over privacy after a BuzzFeed News analysis found that personal user data gathered by both of their apps can be shared with an international network of conservative and religious groups that includes the US National Rifle Association.
The Save the 8th campaign and the LoveBoth Project are at the forefront of the campaign to prevent the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of Ireland's constitution – which makes…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"French laws designed to prohibit individual-level targeting are circumvented by services like those provided by Paris-based firm Liegey Muller Pons, which aggregates personal data. Such services are no less data-intensive than those unconstrained by such legal requirements."
"• Liegey Muller Pons (LMP) is a digital campaigning firm that has provided services to over 1,000 campaigns across six European countries. French law prohibits individual-level targeting except under…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"On Aug. 2, the Liberal party sent an email to Liberal campaigns across the country, promoting services offered by Data Sciences Inc., a company owned by Tom Pitfield, an old friend of Justin Trudeau and the 2019 campaign’s digital director.
The party urged local campaigns to hire the company to handle their Facebook ad buys, for $5,000, $8,000 or $12,000, a significant chunk of the budget of local campaigns, which are limited by the Elections Act to about $100,000.
“The…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract- translated from the original French.
"A political big data company with close ties to the federal liberals and which worked on Emmanuel Macron's campaign in France is setting up its head office in Old Montreal to continue its growth and take advantage of Montreal's digital vitality.
Data Sciences inc. (DS) was born from the victory of the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) in the last election. Tom Pitfield, a close friend of Justin Trudeau, was leading digital operations during…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"Anti-smoking campaigners have expressed alarm that "big tobacco" has been employing two of the world's most powerful lobbying companies in a bid to stymie the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes.
Crosby Textor, which has been hired by the Conservative party to provide "strategic direction" at the next election, has played a powerful behind-the-scenes role in mobilising opposition to the Australian government's plans for plain packaging, which became law on…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"The lobbying firm founded by election guru Lynton Crosby is reported to have advised private healthcare providers on how to exploit failings in the NHS..."
"...Crosby Textor advised an umbrella group of private healthcare providers on how to exploit perceived “failings”, according to a leaked document obtained by the Guardian.
The newspaper published extracts from a slideshow presentation produced for the H5 Private Healthcare Alliance, which stated that people believe the…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"The lobbying firm run by Boris Johnson’s close ally Sir Lynton Crosby has secretly built a network of unbranded “news” pages on Facebook for dozens of clients ranging from the Saudi government to major polluters, a Guardian investigation has found.
In the most complete account yet of CTF Partners’ outlook and strategy, current and former employees of the campaign consultancy have painted a picture of a business that appears to have professionalised online disinformation,…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"A series of hugely influential Facebook advertising campaigns that appear to be separate grassroots movements for a no-deal Brexit are secretly overseen by employees of Sir Lynton Crosby’s lobbying company and a former adviser to Boris Johnson, documents seen by the Guardian reveal.
The mysterious groups, which have names such as Mainstream Network and Britain’s Future, appear to be run independently by members of the public and give no hint that they are connected. But in…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"At the end of an alley on a nondescript street, a political consulting firm with the unusual name of Aristotle International has compiled the nation's largest voter databank, the names of 150 million Americans registered to vote. And it is selling them to politicians like George W. Bush, Joseph I. Lieberman and John McCain in ways that many fear removes too much privacy from the voting booth..."
"...Of particular concern this election season, when electronic privacy has…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"One of the nation's largest commercial distributors of voter data sold voter-registration lists featuring detailed personal information without verifying the identity or intent of buyers.
Aristotle International used a website to sell the lists, which contain details about registered voters from nearly every state. The data includes birth dates, home addresses, phone numbers, race, income levels, ethnic backgrounds and, in some cases, religious affiliations.
Although voter-…
Content Type: Examples
Article extract:
"Knowing your business is big business for Aristotle Inc., whose Orwellian database of voter records has been an essential campaign tool for every president since Ronald Reagan. As the 2008 race heats up, the company’s shadowy founder, John Aristotle Phillips, unveils his most powerful personal-space invader yet."
Link: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/12/aristotle200712
Author: James Verini
Publication: Vanity Fair
Publication date: 12 December 2007
Content Type: Frequently Asked Questions
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: Explainer
The lead author of this piece is Elettra Bietti, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School and volunteer for Privacy International
Network effects
Social media companies and other digital business models are driven by so-called network effects. A network effect (also called a network externality) is a service’s propensity to improve functionally as the number of people using it and the amount of data collected through it increases. For example, as the number of Facebook users increases, Facebook…
Content Type: Examples
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 Real World Masked Face Dataset, a database of more than 5,000 photos of 525 people they found online. The researchers have justified the appropriation by saying images posted to Instagram are public…
Content Type: Video
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…
Content Type: Explainer
Hello friend,
You may have found your way here because you are thinking about, or have just submitted, a Data Subject Access Request, maybe to your Facebook advertisers like we did. Or maybe you are curious to see if Policing, Inc. has your personal data.
The right to access your personal data (or access right) is just one of a number of data rights that may be found in data protection law, including the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, better known as "GDPR", which took…
Content Type: Long Read
Covid Apps are on their way to a phone near you. Is it another case of tech-solutionism or a key tool in our healthcare response to the pandemic? It’s fair to say that nobody quite knows just yet.
We’ve been tracking these apps since the early days. We’ve been monitoring Apple and Google closely, have been involved in the UK’s app process, our partners in Chile and Peru have been tracking their governments’ apps, and more.
Of course privacy concerns arise. But only a simplistic analysis would…
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.
In this third installment of our Covid-19 tracking technology primers, we look at Satellite Navigation technology. In Part 1 of our mini-series on we discussed apps that use Bluetooth for proximity tracking. Telecommunications operators ('telcos'), which we discussed in Part 2, are also handing over customer data, showing the cell towers…
Content Type: Long Read
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: Long Read
On 15th April Margaret Atwood, author of the Handmaid's Tale, gave an interview to BBC Radio 5 Live where she commented that ‘people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism’. You can read more about the interview in the Guardian.
While we agree with Margaret Atwood that we are not necessarily entering an era of "deliberate totalitarianism" we have written the following open letter (download link at the bottom of the page) to her as a ‘…
Content Type: Examples
Mexico is one of the biggest buyers of next-generation surveillance technology. And now data leaked to Forbes indicates it's taken an unprecedented step in becoming the first-known buyer of surveillance technology that silently spies on calls, text messages and locations of any mobile phone user, via a long-vulnerable portion of global telecoms networks known as Signalling System No. 7 (SS7).
The revelation was contained in what an anonymous source close claimed was…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2017, it was reported that a researcher scraped videos of transgender Youtubers documenting their transition process without informing them or asking their permission, as part of an attempt to train artificial intelligence facial recognition software to be able to identify transgender people after they have transitioned.
These videos were primarily of transgender people sharing the progress and results of hormone replacement therapy, including video diaries and time-lapse videos. The…
Content Type: Examples
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 EMRs and up to seven years of their Facebook posts. Matching every person with a depressive diagnosis with five who did not, to mimic the distribution of depression in the population at large, from…
Content Type: Examples
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, education, and gender. In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists taught machine algorithms to detect patterns in decades of responses to three long-running…