Beyond user control

Caucuses, which are used in some US states as a method of voting in presidential primaries, rely on voters indicating their support for a particulate candidate by travelling to the caucus location. In a 2016 Marketplace radio interview, Tom Phillips, the CEO of Dstillery, a big data intelligence

In what proved to be the first of several years of scandals over the use of personal data in illegal, anti-democratic campaigning, in 2015 the Guardian discovered that Ted Cruz's campaign for the US presidency paid at least $750,000 that year to use tens of millions of profiles of Facebook users

In a presentation given at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference in 2016, researchers discussed a method of using the data generated by smart card public transport tickets to catch pickpockets. In a study of 6 million passenger movements in Beijing, the researchers used a classifier to

In the early 2000s, "Agbogbloshie", a section of Old Fadama, a large slum on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, became a dumping ground for unwanted electronic waste, recast as "donations", from the developed world, which found it cheaper to ship in bulk than to recycle: old computers, cameras, TV sets

In 2015, security contractors at Kryptowire discovered that some cheap Android phones came with pre-installed software that monitors where users go, whom they communicate with and the contents of the text messages they write. Written by the China-based company Shanghai Adups Technology Company, the

FindFace compares photos to profile pictures on social network Vkontakte and works out identities with 70% reliability. Some have sounded the alarm about the potentially disturbing implications. Already the app has been used by a St Petersburg photographer to snap and identify people on the city’s

Many people fail to recognise the sensitivity of the data collected by fitness tracking devices, focusing instead on the messages and photographs collected by mobile phone apps and social media. Increasingly, however, researchers are finding that the data collected by these trackers - seemingly

In 2016, Nguyen Phong Hoang, a security researcher in Kyoto, Japan demonstrated that the location of users of gay dating apps such as Grindr, Hornet, and Jack'd can be pinpointed even when they have turned on features intended to obscure it - a dangerous problem for those have not come out publicly

The price of using voice search is that Google records many of the conversations that take place in their presence. Users wishing to understand what Google has captured can do so by accessing the portal the company introduced in 2015. Their personal history pages on the site include both a page

In 2015, Facebook's AI lab announced that its researchers had devised an experimental algorithm that could recognise people in photographs even when their faces are hidden or turned away. The researchers trained a sophisticated neural network on a dataset of 40,000 photographs taken from Flickr

In 2016, Verbraucherzentrale NRW, a consumer protection organisation in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia accused Samsung of harvesting data and sending it back to the company over the internet without informing users as soon as its smart televisions are connected to the internet. The

In 2016, the US's third-largest property and casualty insurer, Liberty Mutual, announced it would partner with Subaru to enable drivers who have bought Subaru's Starlink infotainment system to download a car app that will notify them if they are accelerating too aggressively or braking too hard. The

In 2016, when security expert Matthew Garrett stayed in a London hotel where the light switches had been replaced by Android tablets, it took him only a few hours to gain access to all of the room's electronics. The steps he followed: plug his laptop into a link in place of one of the tablets; set

The discovery in 2016 of previous hacker break-ins such as the 2013 theft of 360 million old MySpace accounts and the 2012 hack of LinkedIn suggest that although websites come and go and "linkrot" means web pages have a short half-life, user data lives on for a deceptively long time. This is

In 2015, ABI Research discovered that the power light on the front of Alphabet's Nest Cam was deceptive: even when users had used the associated app to power down the camera and the power light went off, the device continued to monitor its surroundings, noting sound, movement, and other activities

In a presentation at London's 2016 Black Hat cybersecurity conference, researchers from UCL showed that it was possible to use ultrasound to track consumers across multiple devices. Marketers were already using beacons inaudible to the human ear to activate functions on devices via their microphones