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Content Type: Case Study
The increasing deployment of highly intrusive technologies in public and private spaces such as facial recognition technologies (FRT) threaten to impair our freedom of movement. These systems track and monitor millions of people without any regulation or oversight.
Tens of thousands of people pass through the Kings Cross Estate in London every day. Since 2015, Argent - the group that runs the Kings Cross Estate - were using FRT to track all of those people.
Police authorities rushed in secret…
Content Type: Case Study
In 2015, a man in Connecticut was charged with murdering his wife based on evidence from her Fitbit. Richard Dabate, the accused, told the police that a masked assailant came into the couple’s suburban home at around 9am on 23 December 2015, overpowering Dabate then shooting his wife as she returned through the garage.
However, the victim’s fitness tracker told a different story. According to data from the device, which uses a digital pedometer to track the wearer’s steps, Dabate’s wife was…
Content Type: Long Read
The pressing need to fix our cybersecurity (mis)understandings
Despite all the efforts made so far by different, cybersecurity remains a disputed concept. Some states are still approving cybersecurity laws as an excuse to increase their surveillance powers. Despite cybersecurity and cybercrime being different concepts, the confusion between them and the broad application of criminal statutes is still leading to the criminalise legitimate behaviour.
All of this represents a sizable challenge…
Content Type: Long Read
In this piece we examine mobile phone extraction, relying on publicly available information and Privacy International’s experience from conducting mobile phone extraction using a Cellebrite UFED Touch 2. We welcome input from experts in the field. This is a rapidly developing area. Just as new security features are announced for phones, so too new methods to extract data are found.
[All references can be found in the pdf version below.]
General explanation of mobile phone…
Content Type: Examples
The French data protection regulator, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL), has issued a formal notice to Genesis Industries Limited, the maker of the connected toys My Friend Cayla and I-QUE. Genesis has two months to bring the toys into compliance with data protection law. CNIL says that based on the security flaws found by a consumer association (presumably the Norwegian Consumer Council, which did this work in 2016) its chair decided to perform online…
Content Type: Examples
The UK consumer watchdog Which? has called on retailers to stop selling popular connected toys it says have proven security issues. These include Hasbro's Furby Connect, Vivid Imagination's I-Que robot, and Spiral Toys' Cloudpets and Toy-fi Teddy. In its report, Which? found that these toys do not require authentication to link to other devices via Bluetooth, meaning that any device within range could connect to the toys and take control of them or send messages. Spiral Toys did not comment.…