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On 24 September 2021, PI submitted a complaint to the UK’s data protection authority - the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) challenging the Home Office’s refusal to provide information about its meetings with tech companies around encryption.
 

Human rights defenders are continuously at risk of violence, intimidation and surveillance as a direct consequence of the work they do, with women or those opposing large corporations bearing the brunt of these forms of repression.

Privacy International spoke to four activists based in Colombia, Indonesia, Mexico and South Africa to learn more about their understanding and experiences of surveillance. Their testimonies illustrate how the promises that came with innovation and the use of new technologies have not been enjoyed by all equally, and how some groups in society - such as human rights defenders - have experienced the impact of surveillance and the exploitation of data by governments and companies more severely than others.

Below is an outline of the main issues that these four activists brought to our attention which reflect the concerns raised previously by other organisations and HRDs across the world.

Governments are secretly collaborating with private companies. Here is why PI is concerned about surveillance outsourcing, and why together we urgently must expose them.

On 30 September 2019, Privacy International submitted a statement to the German Constitutional Court in a case concerning the government use of spyware, such as state trojans, in the context of criminal investigations. 

Privacy International filed complaints with multiple data protection regulators to investigate potential GDPR infringements by data brokers, ad-tech companies and credit referencing agencies. 

People all over the world share with menstruation apps their deeply intimate data - the date of their last periods, dates and details pertaining to their sex lives, their moods, their health. This data is being ruthlessly exploited and shared with third parties to target and profile people. 

Privacy International et al. v. FBI et al.: On 21 December 2018, Privacy International, together with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic of the University at Buffalo School of Law, filed a lawsuit demanding U.S. federal law enforcement and immigration authorities turn over information about the nature and extent of their hacking activities.

After months of research, we filed complaints against seven of data broker companies: Acxiom, Criteo, Equifax, Experian, Oracle, Quantcast, and Tapad.