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Content Type: Explainer
Could an app you have never even heard of put you at risk? This is what happened to Chloe (real name has been changed), an investigative journalist exposed by an app that her source was using.
Her source was using TrueCaller, an app that aims to identify phone numbers so users can filter out calls, even if it is from a number they have never encountered before. TrueCaller relies on users tagging numbers who are calling them. And when your number is tagged there is no way for you to know that…
Content Type: Case Study
Photo by Roger H. Goun
Chloe is an investigative journalist working for an international broadcast service; we will call the TV show she works for The Inquirer. She travels around the world to work with local journalists on uncovering stories that make the headlines: from human trafficking to drug cartels and government corruption. While her documentaries are watched by many and inspire change in the countries she works in, you would not know who Chloe is if we were to tell you her real name.…
Content Type: Advocacy
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, is preparing a thematic report to the UN General Assembly on the human rights impacts, especially on those living in poverty, of the introduction of digital technologies in the implementation of national social protection systems. The report will be presented to the General Assembly in New York in October 2019.
As part of this process, the Special Rapporteur invited all interested governments, civil…
Content Type: News & Analysis
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency at the centre of carrying out President Trump’s “zero tolerance” approach to immigration enforcement and family separation, has for years been contracting a US surveillance company to intercept peoples’ communications across the United States.
The wide potential scope for the use of the powers raises concerns about their use for the real-time surveillance of people, families, and communities caught up in Trump’s immigration…
Content Type: Advocacy
Refugees are among the most vulnerable people in the world. From the moment they flee their homes, as they pass through 'temporary' places such as refugee camps and detention centres to their 'final' destinations, they are continuously exposed to threats. In the digital age, these threats are increasingly being driven by the processing of vast amounts of highly sensitive personal data: from enrollment and registration processes needed for them to access services, to their identification and…
Content Type: Video
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: Examples
GDPR complaints about Real-Time Bidding (RTB) in the online advertising industry were filed today with Data Protection Authorities in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The complaints detail the vast scale of personal data leakage by Google and other major companies in the “Ad Tech” industry. This week marks one year since the introduction of the GDPR.
The new complaints have been filed by Gemma Galdon Clavell (Eticas Foundation) and Diego Fanjul (Finch), David Korteweg (…
Content Type: Examples
As a part of Facebook’s efforts to curb disinformation and misinformation on its platform, the company introduced new rules over how political content is marked. This has resulted in content that is educational, news articles, and otherwise seemingly non-political being marked incorrectly and taken down. In Hungary (and Ukraine) this has caused frustration from newspapers, especially due to difference between how Western European papers are treated differently from others. The Guardian reports…
Content Type: Examples
In an effort to improve political advertising transparency, Canada drafted a Bill that requires companies to develop ad libraries, to which ads are added immediately in order for researchers, journalists, and other people to be able to search and understand how political actors are targeting ads. In response, Google announced that it would blanket-ban all political ads in Canada, saying the company was unable to comply with the new law. Google’s decision shows both that the current state of…
Content Type: Examples
Political ads on Facebook are meant to be marked with a disclaimer that says who paid for the ad, as well as be archived into the platform’s ad library, where users are able to see more information about how an ad was targeted. It’s important to note that the ‘who paid for the ad’ requirement is loose, meaning that a generic organisation name could be used, instead of a name that ties the ad to an interest group, for example. These modest requirements of ads transparency came in the wake of…
Content Type: Examples
The two leading Presidential candidates in Ukraine's 2019 elections have expressed frustration at major social media platform's seemingly lack of assistance combatting disinformation and bots. Bots flood social media networks and can promote content or flood platforms with pull requests to have a piece of content taken down. Campaigns are unable to directly contact Google, YouTube, and Facebook for assistance directly and waste resources constantly fighting against bot armies.
https://www.…
Content Type: Examples
Volunteers for Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy were tasked with pouring over social media sites to search for disinformation and combat bot armies that spread negative comments about the candidate. Facebook has been slow to take down 'fake news' and so the volunteers search social media sites for such content, and then report it as violating Facebook's terms of service. While Facebook is Ukraine's most popular social media site, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports that there…
Content Type: Examples
Facebook's efforts to remove disinformation in the wake of the 2019 Ukrainian Presidential election have so far failed. Politico reports that "Among the Facebook pages that spread spurious claims during the election was one with more than 100,000 followers that ran a video claiming (the Presidential candidate) Zelenskiy will allow Russia to take over the country with a violent military operation. Others portrayed him as a drug addict, or Poroshenko (the other Presidential candidate) as an…
Content Type: Long Read
Like millions of other people, you use messaging apps, social media, share, read and watch content on your phone or computer. If that’s the case then hundreds of AdTech companies collect and exchange your data every single day. AdTech, a short form of advertisement technology, is a catch-all term that describes tools and services that connect advertisers with target audiences and publishers. It’s also a multi-billion-dollar industry that is facing investigations by Data Protection Authorities…
Content Type: Examples
Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection authorities against Google and other ad tech firms. The complainants are being made by Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, the private web browser, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, and Michael Veale of University College London. The complaint notifies European regulators of a massive and ongoing data breach that affects virtually every user on the web.
Content Type: Examples
Panoptykon Foundation, the Warsaw based digital rights organization, has joined in the complaints filed in the UK and Ireland in September by Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, Michael Veale of University College London, and Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, by filing a new complaint in Poland. Together, the complainants in Ireland, Poland, and the UK, have also filed new evidence today with the national data protection authorities of Ireland, Poland, and the United Kingdom, that reveals how ad…
Content Type: Examples
The Irish Data Protection Commission has today launched an inquiry into the data practices of ad-tech company Quantcast, a major player in the online tracking industry. PI's 2018 investigation and subsequent submission to the Irish DPC showed how the company is systematically collecting and exploiting people's data in ways people are unaware of. PI also investigated and complained about Acxiom, Criteo, Experian, Equifax, Oracle, and Tapad.
Content Type: Examples
Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK. It’s been more than five months since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. Fundamentally, the GDPR strengthens rights of individuals with regard to the protection of their data, imposes more stringent…
Content Type: Examples
Dr Johnny Ryan filed a formal complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission against IAB Europe, the tracking industry’s primary lobbying organization. The complaint was filed against IAB Europe’s use of an unlawful “cookie wall” on its website. Visitors to IAB Europe’s website, www.iabeurope.eu, are forced to accept tracking by Google, Facebook, and others, which may then monitor them.
Content Type: Long Read
OPTION 1 - LIMIT TARGETED ADVERTISING
A simple step you can take is turning on strong (as possible) privacy settings on the social media platforms you use. Social media platforms play a key role in targeting ads at you – and they facilitate the use of your data in ways that you probably wouldn’t like. We've made guides to show you how to minimise the targeted ads you see on social media. These steps can help make advertising less targeted, meaning that an advertiser, in theory, will knows less…
Content Type: Key Resources
Ukraine held Presidential elections in April 2019. In the run up to the election, there was much debate on the role of Facebook.
Content Type: Examples
In January 2019 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it was investigating an incident in which the food service company Deliveroo reported that some of its customers had complained they were charged up to £1,000 for orders they had not placed. Customers have used social media to report similar problems in the past. Deliveroo claimed that the problem was not its own security but customers who had reused user names and passwords that had been exposed by data breaches on other…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2018, Apple forced Facebook to remove its Onava VPN from the App Store because the Facebook had been using it to harvest data across multiple apps and track user activity. In January 2019, a TechCrunch investigation revealed that in a separate part of the same programme Facebook had been paying users aged 13 to 35 to download a "Facebook Research" VPN and give it root access to their devices to enable it to collect data on their usage habits. The programmed, known as "Project Atlas",…
Content Type: Key Resources
In the lead up to the 2017 German federal elections, there was much debate about the benefits and dangers of data analytics for political purposes. There were some controversies concerning the use of data and the lack of information provided by political parties also raised concerns.