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Ministers have permitted the Shin Bet security service to "use the cellular phone data of carriers of the disease to retrace their steps and identify anyone they may have infected", and will relay the information to the Health Ministry, which will send a message to those who were within two meters (6.6 feet) of the infected person for 10 minutes or more, telling them to go into quarantine. An update to the original order has extended the period during which it is in force from 30 days until the…
Content Type: Examples
A task force at the Italian Ministry of Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Pavia to leverage big data technologies to deal with COVID-19, after the WHO advised governments that lockdowns alone are not enough, and that testing, isolation, and contact tracing are crucial. The effort is beginning with anonymised data provided by Facebook; Italian telcos including Tim, Vodafone, Wind Tre, and FastWeb, via their Asstel trade association, have also offered anonymous datasets…
Content Type: Examples
A task force at the Italian Ministry of Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Pavia to leverage big data technologies to deal with COVID-19, after the WHO advised governments that lockdowns alone are not enough, and that testing, isolation, and contact tracing are crucial. The effort is beginning with anonymised data provided by Facebook; Italian telcos including Tim, Vodafone, Wind Tre, and FastWeb, via their Asstel trade association, have also offered anonymous datasets…
Content Type: Examples
In a rare departure from personalisation, Facebook announced that it had begun inserting a box into its news feed directing users to the Centers for Disease Control’s page about COVID-19, potentially driving many millions of users to reliable information from an authoritative source. Facebook also granted unlimited free ad credits to the World Health Organization to promote accurate information about the crisis. The company also promised to remove “false claims and conspiracy theories that have…
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Facebook announced on its blog that it was providing researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan with aggregated and anonymised mobility data and high resolution population density maps to help inform their forecasting models for the spread of the virus as part of the company's broader "Data for Good program". Facebook said it might expand these efforts to a broader set of partners in the coming weeks. They are also helping partners…
Content Type: Examples
Facebook is providing researchers at Harvard University’s School of Public Health and National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan "aggregated and anonymized" mobility data and high resolution population density maps to help inform their forecasting models for the spread of the virus as part of our broader Data for Good program. Facebook may expand these efforts to a broader set of partners in the coming weeks. They are also helping partners understand how people are talking about the issue online…
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Software on smartphones dictates whether an individual should be quarantined. Chinese citizens in 200 cities, beginning with Hangzhou, are required to install the Alipay Health Code app, developed by Hangzhou's local government with the help of Alipay owner Ant Financial, on their smartphones. After users fill in a form with personal details, the software generates a QR code in one of three colors. Green enables its holder to move about unrestricted. Those with yellow codes may be asked to stay…
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Recent study shows that Americans are wary of data from smart speakers being used in criminal investigations, the Pew Research Center reported. A recent study showed that 49% of Americans answered that it is unacceptable for smart speakers companies to share audio recordings of their customers with law enforcement in order to help with criminal investigations. Only 25% said it is acceptable. Aparently, this result contrasts with some other data use practices measured in the same survey. For…
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A woman was killed by a spear to the chest at her home in Hallandale Beache, Florida, north of Miami, in July. Witness "Alexa" has been called yet another time to give evidence and solve the mystery. The police is hoping that the smart assistance Amazon Echo, known as Alexa, was accidentally activated and recorded key moments of the murder. “It is believed that evidence of crimes, audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo that occurred in the main bedroom … may be found on…
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Rewire.News has reported that Google apparently remains unwilling to differentiate its Maps search results between clinics in the US that offer abortion care and faith-based organisations that do not provide abortion care.
Rewire.News reports that, in contrast Yelp "made a concerted effort" to ensure that the company differentiated between faith-based centres, also known as crisis pregnancy centres in the US, and medical facilities that provided medical reproductive healthcare, including…
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A new investigative report from Sharona Coutts at Rewire exposed how anti-choice groups, including at least one adoption agency, were resorting to using a technology called "geofencing" to find and then target individuals they believe are considering abortion, with targeted ads.
Two groups, a clearinghouse that operates many crisis pregnancy centers and a large adoption agency called Bethany Christian Services, were reported to have hired Copley Advertising to provide them with this…
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Ahead of the Irish referendum to amend the Constitutions of Ireland to allow the parliament to legislative for abortion which took place in May 2018, Google decided to stop all advertising relating to the referendum on all of its advertising platforms, including AdWords and YouTube.
This followed decisions by Facebook to no longer accept advertising relating to the referendum funded by foreign organisations outside Ireland, and Twitter not allowing any advertising in relation to the…
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Bethany Christian Services, an international pregnancy support and adoption agency, is launching a programme with Copley Advertising to send targeted ads to individuals visiting Planned Parenthood clinics, abortion clinics, methadone clinics and high-risk areas (AHPA). The targeting will be done through the use of geo fencing based on smartphones located within the selected locations.
Source: https://www.liveaction.org/news//adoption-agency-send-pro-life-ads-smartphones-inside-abortion-…
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Denmark released 32 prisoners as part of an ongoing review of 10,700 criminal cases, after serious questions arose regarding the reliability of geolocation data obtained from mobile phone operators. Among the various problems with the software used to convert the phone data into usable evidence, it was found that the system connected the phones to several towers at once, sometimes hundreds of kilometres apart, recorded the origins of text messages incorrectly and got the location of specific…
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US campaigners supported by the Catholic church are promoting the app Femm, which collects sensitive data about women's sexual lives and aim to scare women from using hormonal birth control, in rural Nigeria. Femm received a $100,000 from the Papal Foundation to promote their app.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jul/15/femm-menstruation-tracking-app-nigeria-anti-pill-campaignersus-
Author: Jessica Glenza
Publication: The Guardian
Content Type: Examples
Following pressure from civil society and pro-abortion groups, Facebook announced on May 8th 208 a ban on foreign ads related to the Irish referendum on abortion. Facebook said they were being consistent with Irish electoral law.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/facebook-bans-foreign-ads-for-eighth-amendment-referendum-1.3487895
Author: Ciara O'Brien
Publication: Irish Times
Content Type: Examples
Una Mullally writes about the online campaign led by the anti-abortion groups Protect the 8th and Undecided8 and their targeting of undecided voters in Ireland. She spoke to Facebook about their role in the spreading of those campaign and to campaigner Gavin Sheridan, who has demanded transparency to control the role of big tech platforms in democratic processes in Ireland.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/the-poisonous-online-campaign-to-defeat-the-abortion-referendum-1.3486236
Author: Una…
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In this piece Gavin Sheridan, transparency campaigner and CEO of legal intelligence company Vizlegal, argues for the need for a regulatory oversight to control the impact big tech companies and force them to be more transparent.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/13/ireland-abortion-mark-zuckerberg-referendum
Author: Gavin Sheridan
Publication: The Guardian
Content Type: Examples
A 17-year-old Palestinian resident of Lebanon, Ismail B. Ajjawi, was deported shortly after he arrived at Boston Airport, where he was due to start attending Harvard University the following week.
Immigration officers subjected him to hours of questioning — at one point leaving to search his phone and computer — according to a written statement by Ajjawi. According to the student, his visa was revoked because of content posted by some social media contacts.
The student alleges that…
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A February 2019 study of facial recognition systems found that these systems are not designed with transgender and nonbinary people in mind. Researcher Os Keyes studied 30 years of facial recognition research, including 58 separate research papers, and found that more than 90% of the time researchers followed a binary gender model, more than 70% of the time viewed gender as immutable, and, in gender-specific research, more than 80% of the time viewed gender as a purely physiological construct.…
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In 2018, Brian Hofer, the chair of Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission, filed suit after police wrongfully stopped him at gunpoint because their automated license plate recognition system, supplied by Vigilant Solutions, indicated that the rental car he was driving had been stolen. The car had in fact been stolen some months earlier, but been recovered. Despite such errors, police claim that the technology has helped reduce crime, identify stolen vehicles, and identify and arrest suspects.…
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In 2018, to prove how easily soldiers' real-world actions can be manipulated via social media, researchers at NATO's Strategic Communications Center of Excellence (StratCom) conducted a red-team exercise in which they "catfished" members of the armed forces. Using information collected from Facebook profiles and people search websites, the researchers created targeted advertising to draw soldiers to phony Facebook pages mimicking those service members use to connect with each other. In the…
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In February 2019, after investigative journalists used social media posts to investigate the country's hidden role in conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Syria, Russia began moving to ban its soldiers from posting any information that would expose their whereabouts or their role in the military. The ban would include photographs, video, geolocation data, and other information, and prohibit soldiers from sharing information about other soldiers and their relatives.
https://www.reuters.com/…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, repossession services in the US were experiencing a boom in business as the number of Americans failing to keep up with their car payments reached its highest point since 2012. One of these, Ohio-based Relentless Recovery, was increasing its hit rate by equipping its agents' vehicles with cameras to help it build a database of every license plate in the state along with the locations where the vehicles may be easily found. Repo agents collect most of the billions of license plate scans…
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In February 2019, the UK Home Office told the Independent Chief of Borders and Immigration that it was planning to build a system that could check and confirm an individual's immigration status in real time to outside organisation such as employers, landlords, and health and benefits services. Lawyers and human rights campaigners expressed concerns that the project had received no scrutiny or public discussion, and that the Home Office's record suggested the result would be to unfairly lock…
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In February 2019 Gemalto announced it would supply the Uganda Police Force with its Cogent Automated Biometric Identification System and LiveScan technology in order to improve crime-solving. LiveScan enables police to capture biometric data alongside mugshots and biographical data. CABIS speeds up the biometric matching process by mapping distinctive characteristics in fingerprints, palm prints, and facial images. The Ugandan police will also pilot Gemalto's Mobile Biometric Identification…
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In November 2018, Italy's Data Protection Authority advised against a proposal from the country's Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, to replace "parent 1 and parent 2" on children's national ID cards with "mother and father". Salvini, who campaigned for election earlier in 2018 on a socially conservative platform, also called for gender-specific terms throughout the application and for applications submitted on behalf of under-14s to include permission from both parents. The DPA argued that the…
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In February 2019 BuzzFeed News reported that one of the largest home DNA testing companies, FamilyTreeDNA, had formed an agreement with the FBI to grant the agency access to its database of more than 1 million genetic profiles, most of which were supplied by consumers with no thought that they would be accessible to law enforcement. FamilyTreeDNA has also agreed to test DNA evidence and identify remains of victims of violent crimes for the FBI in its own laboratory. FamilyTreeDNA said…
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In January 2019 the UK Home Office announced it would collaborate with France to overhaul its regime for suspicious activity reports in order to fight money laundering. In 2018, the number of SARs filed with the National Crime Agency rose by 10% to nearly 464,000. Banks, financial services, lawyers, accountants, and estate agents are all obliged to file SARs if they suspect a person or organisation is involved in money laundering, terrorist finance, or other suspicious activity. The system has…