Long Reads

How would you feel if you were fingerprinted by the police before you were allowed to take part in a peaceful public demonstration? As tens of thousands of people attend massive public demonstrations across the UK today against US President Donald Trump in a ‘Carnival of Resistance’, it’s a question

This piece was written by PI voluteer Natalie Chyi. Transparency is necessary to ensure that those in power – including governments and companies – are not able to operate in the dark, away from publicscrutiny. That’s why calls for more transparency are routine by everyone from civil society and

Privacy and data protection are currently being debated more intensively than ever before. In this interview, Frederike Kaltheuner from the civil rights organisation Privacy International explains why those terms have become so fundamentally important to us. The article was first published in the

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office announces it intends to fine Facebook the maximum amount possible for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Update 28 June 2018 Last week Privacy International wrote to Thomson Reuters Corporation asking the company to commit to ensuring the vast amounts of data they provide to US immigration agencies isn’t used to identify families for indefinite detention or separation, or for other human rights abuses

The European Union's new data privacy law (General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR) takes effect today May 25th, 2018, after a two-year transition period. Despite some companies appearing to believe otherwise, and many articles misrepresenting its contents, the GDPR will have a

We found the image here. Open a Russian Matryoshka doll and you will find a smaller doll inside. Ask a large data company such as Acxiom and Oracle where they get their data from, and the answer will be from smaller data companies. Data companies – a catch all term for data brokers, advertisers

Privacy and data protection are fundamental rights. When respected they help improve trust and reduce power imbalances. Individuals should have rights over their personal data, regardless of who holds or processes it, and effective ways to enforce those rights, through independent bodies. While not

If you operate an internet company in Russia, you aren’t necessarily surprised to one day open the door to someone, grasping in one hand a bundle of wires and in the other a letter from a government agency demanding access to your servers, with a black box wedged under one arm. Internet companies in

Hasn't Facebook said it would give European data protection to all of their users? Yes, but only in very vague language. In an initial reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Facebook would apply the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) “in spirit” to their