As states around the world seek to expand their surveillance capabilities and "harness the power of data" to deliver public services, they are often tempted to use the services of private technology companies – through public-private partnerships (‘PPPs’). These partnerships often evade key transparency and accountability mechanisms, impacting human rights and public sector decision-making in opaque ways. This is why we call for all such partnerships to be subject to strict PPP Safeguards. We also have developed a Handbook to help others investigate and challenge PPPs.
Our Public Private Surveillance Partnerships Tracker collects news pieces from around the world, covering this evolving landscape of collaborations between governments and private technology companies in the realm of surveillance and mass data processing.
This page will be updated as we find more examples and stories about problematic PPPs all around the world.
When the Los Angeles Police Department opted to monitor the messages posted in forums on Neighbors, a companion app to Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras, the system forwarded over 13,000 messages in just over two years. Research shows, however, that this type of surveillance does a poor job of
Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6 between 2009 and 2014, set up a meeting between Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the Cabinet Office permanent secretary, John Manzoni, in 2019; a year later the US-based company was awarded a £27 million contract to process border and customs data without competitive
Cellebrite, which provides technology to unlock phones and access their data, asks its government agency customers to keep both its technology and the fact that they used it secret, a leaked company training video shows. Such a request violates the rights of the public to expect that authorities are
The UK Home Office has drawn up secret plans to draft a letter lobbying the Information Commissioner's Office to allow the privately held company Facewatch's matching service to spread into retail shops and supermarkets across Britain in order to curb shoplifting. The strategy was agreed in a
Over 60 US cities and counties use Fusus, a "police technology platform that merges public and private cameras with predictive policing and other surveillance tools". Private surveillance camera owners are encouraged to enroll in a police-led program that enables the police to control these cameras
The UK's Home Office is expanding its contract with the Portuguese company Tekever, which has supplied live-streamed drone footage captured by a combination of radar, video, and infrafred imagery through a £1 billion contract since 2020; this contract is now being extended to monitor large stretches
The Greek defence startup Lambda Automata is putting up "Outpost" autonomous observation towers to enhance monitoring of the country's numerous islands in the Aegean Sea, important in territorial conflicts with Turkey. The towers use computer vision algorithms to turn CCTV cameras into situational
At least 37 US colleges and universities, as well as numerous school district, have repurposed Social Sentinel (recently renamed Navigate360 Detect) to help campus police surveil student protests. The software is marketed as a safety tool that can scan students' social media posts and university
Notorious military tech company Anduril is pushing its technology to the border surveillance market. Along the US-Mexico border, its surveillance towers "use an artificial intelligence system called Lattice to autonomously identify, detect and track “objects of interest”, such as humans or vehicles
In September 2022, the UK Department for Education announced that under a £270,000 contract with Suffolk-based Wonde Ltd it would collect data on children's school attendance and potentially share it with other government departments and third parties as part of its drive to raise attendance. A
Republic Squiare, one of the cultural and social hubs of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, is under constant surveillance by equipment made by the Chinese company Huawei that recognises faces, identifies vehicle number plates, and judges whether activities are "suspicious". Despite controversy over the
Under a five-year $20.7 million contract, the US state of Utah is allowing the AI company Banjo real time access to numerous sources of state-owned camera and location data, among other types and combine it with information collected from social media, satellites, and other apps in order to use its
