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Content Type: Examples
As part of efforts to make returning to campus safer, US universities are considering or implementing mandates requiring students to install exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and other unproven new technologies, risking exacerbating existing inequalities in access to both technology and education. In some cases, such as Indiana University, UMass Amherst, and the University of New Hampshire, universities are requiring students to make a blanket commitment to install…
Content Type: Examples
A preliminary study finds that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people wearing masks. The study tested 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms, and the best had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching unmasked photos with photos of the same person wearing a digitally-applied mask. Masks both lowered the algorithms’ accuracy rates and raised the number of failures to process. The more of the nose is covered by the mask the lower the algorithm’s accuracy; however, error…
Content Type: Examples
Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a secure mobile phone app into which users enter their name, address, date of birth, phone number, and doctor information, plus a scanned official identity document against which the smartphone can…
Content Type: Examples
By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%. The govt’s SAGE committee has said that 80% of infected people’s contacts just be contacted and told to self-isolate within 48 to 72 hours for the programme to be effective. Local councils are…
Content Type: Examples
The non-profit Resolve to Save Lives, led by Tom Frieden, director of the CDC in the Obama administration, finds that six months after the first coronavirus cases in the US most states are failing to report crucial information needed to track and control the spread of COVID-19. Among the issues: only two states report how quickly contact tracers can interview people who have tested positive; no states report on turnaround times of diagnostic tests; and some states don’t even report data every…
Content Type: Examples
Analysis of untreated wastewater from the county health department in Yosemite Valley led Biobot Analytics, based in Cambridge, MA, to estimate that 170 people in Yosemite national park during the July 4 weekend may have been infected with the coronavirus, dropping to 60 during the following week. The neighbouring community showed lower levels, suggesting that the higher volume was related to visitors, who tend to crowd popular sites, and parks are not in a position to enforce mask-wearing. No…
Content Type: Examples
A study describes the data transmitted to backend servers by the Google/Apple based contact tracing (GAEN) apps in use in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark and finds that the health authority client apps are generally well-behaved from a privacy point of view, although the Irish, Polish, Danish, and Latvian apps could be improved in this respect. However, the study also finds that the Google Play Services component of the apps contacts Google servers as often as every 20 minutes…
Content Type: Examples
Under a new $10 million-plus contract, in July the US Department of Health and Human Services began sending hospital statistics such as bed availability, patient numbers, and ventilators to the Pittsburgh company TeleTracking Technologies for analysis with no guarantee the information would be made public. Until then, the data were gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for analysis and reporting back to the states twice a week via the CDC’s long-established and highly…
Content Type: Examples
When Google and Apple announced their joint platform for contact tracing, the companies said the system would not track users’ locations. By mid-July, the resulting apps had been downloaded more than 20 million times in companies such as Germany and Switzerland. However, in order for Bluetooth, which the app requires, to work on Android phones, users must enable location services, with the result that Google may be able to track their location. Governments and health officials in Germany,…
Content Type: Examples
Individuals accept giving more information in emergencies, and the tradeoffs between providing emergency help and privacy must be carefully considered. A study of popular disaster apps finds that many apps ignore privacy policies and government agency policies. Twelve of the 14 apps studied capture location immediately on download, and some apps fail to identify all third-party data recipients. Refusing location tracking for one app may be overridden when individuals turn it on for the…
Content Type: Examples
US epidemiologists are complaining that secrecy is interfering with public health efforts to curb the coronavirus. Beginning in April, California state and county health authorities have refused requests from scientists from Stanford University and several University of California campuses for detailed COVID-19 and contact tracing data for research they hope will find more effective approaches to slowing the epidemic. The agencies have cited reasons such as workload constraints and privacy…
Content Type: Examples
Several of the Chinese companies producing personal protective equipment such as face masks were shown via undercover video footage to be using Uighur labour under a government labour transfer programme that pays regional subsidies for each worker taken in. The equipment is being shipped all over the world, including to the US and Latin America. In the course of the pandemic, the number of companies producing PPE in Xinjiang has risen from four to 51. At Medwell, one such company, Uighurs are…
Content Type: Examples
An audit of two apps and a website used by national and local governments in Colombia finds: an absence of public information about the tools, how they work, or how their security and privacy is protected; non-compliance with Colombia’s data protection legal framework, particularly in the area of consent; and reckless deployment of solutions that put hundreds of thousands of users’ personal data at risk. Fundación Karisma, which conducted the audit, makes a number of recommendations for…
Content Type: Examples
An “intelligence note” found in a trove of law enforcement documents known as BlueLeaks shows that the US Department of Homeland Security fears that face masks are breaking law enforcement facial recognition. The note came from the post-9/11 Minnesota Fusion Center and was distributed on May 26, 2020, as the protests over the killing of George Floyd were beginning, and was sent to city and state government officials, private security officers in Colorado. The note fears both ongoing mask-…
Content Type: Examples
Human Rights Watch reports that drug cartels and rebel groups are imposing their own lockdowns in rural areas of Colombia and using WhatsApp chats and pamphlets to advise local residents of curfew hours, transport shutdowns, and other bans that are far more strict than those imposed by the government. They have murdered at least eight civilians. In some areas, violent gangs are preventing people from leaving their homes at all, in two provinces armed groups have punished violators by torching…
Content Type: Examples
Immunity passports would impose artificial restrictions on who can and cannot participate in social, civic, and economic activities, and create a perverse incentive for individuals, particularly those who can’t afford a period of exclusion, to seek out infection, posing a health risk to anyone they come into contact with. Both governments and individuals may be under pressure to return employees to the workforce, and immunity passports may lead governments to believe they have a quick fix that…
Content Type: Examples
The French data protection authority, CNIL, has examined the French contact tracing app and ruled that it is not fully compliant with the provisions of GDPR and the French data protection law. CNIL’s primary complaint was that the app transferred the news that a user had been infected to all their contacts, not just those who had been in recent proximity, and the privacy policy was insufficiently specific about the categories of data that were being processed and its recipients. Finally, the…
Content Type: Long Read
An edited version of this article was originally published on the EDRi website in September 2020.
Introduction
Monopolies, mergers and acquisitions, anti-trust laws. These may seem like tangential or irrelevant issues for privacy and digital rights organisations. But having run our first public petition opposing a big tech merger, we wanted to set out why we think this is an important frontier for people's rights across Europe and indeed across the world.
In June, Google notified the…
Content Type: Examples
Hundreds of trucks carrying goods and humanitarian aid from Cameroon’s Douala sea port to Central African Republic are stranded at the border because testing kits are in short supply; under an agreement, Cameroon drivers who test negative are supposed to be granted access. Results of tests completed at local hospitals inside Cameroon are being rejected even though the CAR transport ministers assured drivers they would be honoured. CAR depends on the Douala seaport for about 95% of its goods and…
Content Type: Examples
Following trials in Leicester, Luton, and Blackburn with Darwen, the UK government will assign teams of health care professionals to more than ten local authorities and offer them Public Health England’s near real-time data on infections and a dedicated team of contact tracers, shifting away from its £10 billion centralised national system run under contract by Serco. As of early August, the Serco scheme was still failing to reach a significant proportion of those who had been in close contact…
Content Type: Examples
Several people have been arrested in Bangladesh for issuing bogus documentation to people who have not been tested for the coronavirus showing they are not infected. Such documents are required for migrant workers, who need to show that they are virus-free when they arrive at their overseas destination, and whose remittances back to their families are an important source of income for the country ($19 billion in 2019). Criminal gangs advertise on social media to find potential buyers; in one…
Content Type: Examples
Egyptian doctors are reporting that they are being threatened for speaking and posting publicly about working conditions as they struggle in a medical system overwhelmed by the coronavirus. At least seven members of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, a quasi-governmental body that represents health care workers, are being detained for discussing COVID-19 on social media, which the government characterised as spreading false news; syndicate board member was arrested after criticising prime minister…
Content Type: Video
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Content Type: Advocacy
Privacy International responded to a call for submissions of the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women and Girls on the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women and girls in situations of crisis.
This submission builds on PI’s research highlighting the ways in which data exploitative technologies can obstruct the realisation of sexual and reproductive rights, and research carried out by our partners on the specific manifestations of these obstacles in multiple countries of…
Content Type: Case Study
The Peruvian government has a history of collaboration with the private sector in developing technology with the alleged purpose of providing greater security to citizens. The most recent example, the smartphone application "Peru En Tus Manos" launched in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, has been developed in a similar fashion and currently collects geolocation data on more than a million users. Although Peru has a proper legal framework for public private partnerships, developments are…
Content Type: Case Study
Como is one of the most advanced cities in Italy in the use of facial recognition technology (FRT). An investigation for the Italian Wired magazine published in June 2020 exposed how the system had been bought, installed and tested for months with little transparency and despite the lack of a clear legal framework.
The investigation was entirely based on tools available to everyone, such as Freedom of Information requests (FOI requests. Similar to PI’s campaign 'Unmasking policing, inc', it…
Content Type: Report
Privacy International partnered with the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School to guide the reader through a simple presentation of the legal arguments explored by national courts around the world who have been tasked with national courts that discuss the negative implications of identity systems, particularly on human rights, and to present their judgement.
This argumentation guide seeks to fill that gap by providing a clear, centralised source of the arguments advanced in…
Content Type: Examples
Human rights experts have accused the home secretary, Priti Patel, of ignoring legal guidance in an attempt to target child asylum seekers who cannot prove they are under 18.
A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Observer, reveals that the government is putting pressure on social workers to speed up the age assessment of unaccompanied minors, and offering to bankroll councils that face legal challenges as a result. The move comes as new evidence shows that hundreds of people were deported…
Content Type: Examples
Around 8,800 children have been deported from the United States along the Mexican border thanks to a new pandemic-related measure that functionally stripped the rights of those seeking asylum.
Donald Trump’s administration has expelled nearly 160,000 people since the emergency order proclaimed by the CDC took effect in March including roughly 7,600 adults and children who came to the US in families. The emergency order temporarily suspends citizens, regardless of their country of origin, from…