Advanced Search
Content Type: Long Read
Period tracking apps and the rollback of reproductive rightsThe aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States (US) sparked widespread debate and concern that data from period tracking apps could be use to criminalise those seeking abortion care.While the surveillance and criminalisation of reproductive choices are neither new nor unique to the US, the scale and intensity of today’s crisis continue to grow. To put it into perspective, 22 million women and girls of reproductive…
Content Type: Long Read
If you’ve ever used TikTok, Instagram, or X/Twitter, you will already be familiar with centralised social media.Centralised social media means big company owns the app, controls the software, and keeps all your data.For example, ByteDance makes TikTok. They own it, run the servers, decide what you see in your feed, and hold onto every video you like or comment on. They call the shots when it comes to your data.But what if social media didn’t work that way? What if no single company was in…
Content Type: Long Read
“Hey [enter AI assistant name here], can you book me a table at the nearest good tapas restaurant next week, and invite everyone from the book club?” Billions of dollars are invested in companies to deliver on this. While this is a dream that their marketing departments want to sell, this is a potential nightmare in the making.Major tech companies have all announced flavours of such assistants: Amazon’s Alexa+, Google’s Gemini inspired by Project Astra, Microsoft’s Copilot AI companion and…
Content Type: News & Analysis
We’ve been asked a lot lately about whether it is safe to travel, particularly to the US. And it’s not surprising why: the US Government is increasing their cruelty at borders.Border management today is fueled by our data, but government officials want more. They want as much data as they can get to catch you out. They’ve reportedly detained or deported people based on their free speech activities, denying entry on tenuous grounds like having the wrong photos on phones (including in in the ‘…
Content Type: Long Read
IntroductionIn early October this year, Google announced its AI Overviews would now have ads. AI companies have been exploring ways to monetise their AI tools to compensate for their eye watering costs, and advertising seems to be a part of many of these plans. Microsoft have even rolled out an entire Advertising API for its AI chat tools.As AI becomes a focal point of consumer tech, the next host of the AdTech expansion regime could well be the most popular of these AI tools: AI chatbots.…
Content Type: Report
First published in 2017, PI’s Guide to International Law and Surveillance is an attempt to collate relevant excerpts from these judgments and reports into a single principled guide that will be regularly updated. This is the fourth edition of the Guide. It has been updated it to reflect the most relevant legal developments until March 2024.The Guide aspires to be a handy reference tool for anyone engaging in campaigning, advocacy, and scholarly research, on these issues. The fourth…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Is the AI hype fading? Consumer products with AI assistant are disappointing across the board, Tech CEOs are struggling to give examples of use cases to justify spending billions into Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and models training. Meanwhile, data protection concerns are still a far cry from having been addressed.
Yet, the believers remain. OpenAI's presentation of ChatGPT was reminiscent of the movie Her (with Scarlett Johannsen's voice even being replicated a la the movie), Google…
Content Type: Advocacy
Generative AI models are based on indiscriminate and potentially harmful data scrapingExisting and emergent practices of web-scraping for AI is rife with problems. We are not convinced it stands up to the scrutiny and standards expected by existing law. If the balance is got wrong here, then people stand to have their right to privacy further violated by new technologies.The approach taken by the ICO towards web scraping for generative AI models may therefore have important downstream…
Content Type: Video
Please note the views expressed in the video are the interviewee's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of PI.
In his interview, Alexandru told us that he started to work for Uber in 2018. Despite being aware of negative experiences of others, he felt that everything was running smoothly, and for a while, Uber met his expectations.
However, in 2021, he received a notice from Uber that they had noticed fraudulent activity associated with his account. He went on social media and…
Content Type: Video
Please note the views expressed in the video are the interviewee's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of PI.
Driver X (he wishes to remain anonymous) has been working for Uber for five years. After working for Uber for two and half years, he suddenly received a message telling him that his account had been temporarily suspended and asking him not to call Uber while the investigation was pending. He was baffled, as he had an excellent record and rating, with plenty of positive…
Content Type: Long Read
What if your boss was an algorithm? What would you do if your employer suddenly fired you or reduced your pay without telling you why? And without being willing to give you a reason when you ask for one?
This is not science fiction or some far-fetched reality. Millions of people worldwide are working in the gig economy sector for companies like Uber, Deliveroo, Bolt, Just Eat… And this could be the future of work for people working outside the gig economy, as surveillance technologies are…
Content Type: Video
Update: Pa has since won a settlement from UberPlease note the views expressed in the video are interviewee's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of PI.Pa used to work for Uber. After some time, Uber started asking him to submit a picture of himself to the platform to confirm it was indeed him who had completed the job. However, with time, the frequency of the requests increased. In the beginning, the requests for a picture only happened once a week, but as time went by Pa told us that…
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
Privacy matters. It matters when you’re walking the streets of your home town and when you’re fleeing your home in search of safety. It matters if you’re at a protest or if you’re in bed.
Our wellbeing in each of these instances depends on the protection of our privacy. No situation can be fully understood in isolation.
Unjustifiable intrusions on our privacy become a weapon to eradicate communities and prey upon refugees and asylum seekers, push people away from protests in fear of…
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: Explainer
At first glance, infrared temperature checks would appear to provide much-needed reassurance for people concerned about their own health, as well as that of loved ones and colleagues, as the lockdown is lifted. More people are beginning to travel, and are re-entering offices, airports, and other contained public and private spaces. Thermal imaging cameras are presented as an effective way to detect if someone has one of the symptoms of the coronavirus - a temperature.
However, there is little…
Content Type: Case Study
You have the right to decent standards and dignity at work, and the right to join a union to protect yourself and your rights. That might come as a shock to Amazon - who have been using Covid-19 as a reason to undermine those rights.
Chris Smalls, an organiser and now former Amazon warehouse assistant manager, led a walkout at a New York City facility and within days he’d been fired under a dubious pretext.
The walkout was to ensure workers’ safety - they were asking for the warehouse to be…
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: Case Study
Over the past decade targeted advertisement has become exponentially more invasive. To enable targeted advertisement, massive amounts of data about individuals are collected, shared and processed often without their knowledge or consent. This information about us is then used to profile us and micro-target us to sell us products or influence our views.
This is a significant intrusion to our privacy inevitably affects our perogative not to reveal our thoughts; not to have our thoughts…
Content Type: Case Study
Since August 2017 742,000 Rohingya people - including children - fled across the Myanmar border to Bangladesh, escaping what the UN labelled a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
In this context of ethnoreligious violence, Facebook has been a central figure. For many in Myanmar “Facebook is the internet” - as of January 2018 around 19 million people in Myanmar were facebook users, this is roughly equal to the number of internet users in the country.
A New York Times report revealed that…
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
In Peru, you get asked for your fingerprint and your ID constantly - when you’re getting a new phone line installed or depositing money in your bank account – and every Peruvian person has an ID card, and is included in the National Registry of Identity – a huge database designed to prove that everyone is who they say they are. After all, you can change your name, but not your fingerprint.
However, in 2019 the National Police of Peru uncovered a criminal operation that was doing just that:…
Content Type: Case Study
There are 29.4 million refugees and asylum seekers across the globe today. These are people who have fled their countries due to conflict, violence or persecution seeking protection in safer environments.
People have protected those in need fleeing from dire situations since antiquity. However, over recent years, European countries have become increasingly hostile towards refugees - treating them as criminals instead of people in need.
In 2017, German authorities passed a…
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: Case Study
In 2015, a man in Connecticut was charged with murdering his wife based on evidence from her Fitbit. Richard Dabate, the accused, told the police that a masked assailant came into the couple’s suburban home at around 9am on 23 December 2015, overpowering Dabate then shooting his wife as she returned through the garage.
However, the victim’s fitness tracker told a different story. According to data from the device, which uses a digital pedometer to track the wearer’s steps, Dabate’s wife was…
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, …
Content Type: News & Analysis
The latest news of Twitter “inadvertently” sharing email addresses or phone numbers provided for safety or security purposes (for example, two-factor authentication) for advertising purposes is extremely concerning for several reasons.
First of all, it is not the first time for Twitter's used people's data in ways they wouldn't expect or that ignores their choices: in August, the company disclosed that it may have shared data on users with advertising partners, even if they had opted out from…
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…