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Content Type: Long Read
What happened?On 19 July 2024, American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released an update to its CrowdStrike Falcon software that ultimately caused 8.5 million computers running Microsoft Windows to crash. The damage done was both deep and wide: deep because the computers affected were unable to recover without direct user intervention. Wide because a whole range of companies - from airlines to healthcare to media - across a whole range of countries - from Sweden to India to New Zealand -…
Content Type: Long Read
In 2019, the Waorani achieved a huge legal victory against the Ecuadorian government. They opposed the sale of millions of hectares of their rainforest to new oil companies, a forest that forms part of the home and territory of seven different Indigenous peoples in the southern Ecuadorian Amazon. Nemonte Nenquimo, as the first female leader of the Waorani of Pastaza and co-founder of the nonprofit Alianza Ceibo, and plaintiff in this case, has been a powerful advocate for her community’s…
Content Type: Long Read
IntroductionHarnessing new digital technology to improve people’s health is now commonplace across the world. Countries and international organisations alike are devising digital health strategies and looking to emerging technology to help solve tricky problems within healthcare. At the same time, more and more start-ups and established tech companies are bringing out new, and at times innovative, digital tools aimed at health and wellbeing.
Content Type: Long Read
Education is a fundamental human right outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 26), which states that everyone has the right to education. Schools play a core role in the education of children, but it’s also in schools that children are encouraged to learn to work with others, and to develop their own identities and emotional skills. The education process doesn’t stop there, it continues as children grow and make their way through different higher educational spaces such…
Content Type: Long Read
1. What is the issue?Governments and international organisations are developing and accessing databases to pursue a range of vague and ever-expanding aims, from countering terrorism and investigating crimes to border management and migration control.These databases hold personal, including biometric, data of millions if not billions of people, and such data is processed by technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), to surveil, profile, predict future behaviour, and ultimately make…
Content Type: Long Read
The fourth edition of PI’s Guide to International Law and Surveillance provides the most hard-hitting past and recent results on international human rights law that reinforce the core human rights principles and standards on surveillance. We hope that it will continue helping researchers, activists, journalists, policymakers, and anyone else working on these issues.The new edition includes, among others, entries on (extra)territorial jurisdiction in surveillance, surveillance of public…
Content Type: Explainer
Behind every machine is a human person who makes the cogs in that machine turn - there's the developer who builds (codes) the machine, the human evaluators who assess the basic machine's performance, even the people who build the physical parts for the machine. In the case of large language models (LLMs) powering your AI systems, this 'human person' is the invisible data labellers from all over the world who are manually annotating datasets that train the machine to recognise what is the colour…
Content Type: Video
LinksFind out more about encryption:Computerphile on YouTube is a computer science professor with a range of useful and accessible videos on encryptionCloudflare have a helpful learning centre including this article on how encryption works and why cloudflare use Lava lamps to generate keysThis is a helpful article on Diffie-Hellman including a diagram of the colours demonstration, which Ed discusses during the podcastThis article is great for learning more about hashingAnd if you're interested…
Content Type: Examples
According to police plans to enhance “school safety”, security cameras and facial recognition will monitor children in Hong Kong in class and around educational facilities. The move is part of a trend also found in China, India, and the US toward mining children’s data, even though few benefits have been found.Article: Hong Kong schools adopt facial recognition and security camerasPublication: Biometric UpdateWriter: Christ Burt
Content Type: Long Read
Our world is undergoing a seismic process of increasing digitisation, which sees the proliferation of new technologies and the growing integration of these technologies into public services, which rely more and more on copious amounts of personal data and on automated processes. This phenomenon has a unique impact upon the rights of persons with disabilities. As the era of global digitisation causes societies worldwide to undergo a digital metamorphosis, persons with…
Content Type: Long Read
The defense and protection of the environment continues to come at a high cost for activists and human rights defenders. In 2021, the murders of environment and land defenders hit a record high. This year, a report by Global Witness found that more than 1,700 environmental activists have been murdered in the past decade.
While the issue of surveillance of human rights defenders has received attention, evidence of the surveillance of environmental activists keeps mounting, with recent examples…
Content Type: News & Analysis
The relationship between privacy and access to abortion care
In 1973, in the state of Texas, it was a criminal offence to “procure or attempt” an abortion except if the purpose was “saving the life of the mother.” This law was enacted in 1854 by the Texas state legislature, and was part of a wave of provisions criminalising access to abortion care that was gaining ground across the U.S in the mid-1800s. It is worth highlighting that these laws were being passed at a time when women in the U.S…
Content Type: Video
Links
A resource for teachers we've been working with Ina on (consultation draft at the moment so please get in touch if you have thoughts!)
More about critical data literacy
The database of resources for teaching about big data and algorithmic systems Ina mentioned
PI's guides to help you and your loved ones protect yourselves online
Content Type: Video
In this video we introduce ourselves and explain why we wanted to create the “Teaching about Data” resource and what our goals for the resource are.