Expose Data Exploitation: Data, Profiling, and Decision Making

Earlier this week it was announced that UK-based Datasift would start offering their customers the ability to mine Twitter’s past two years of tweets for market research purposes. The licensing fees will add another revenue stream to Twitter's portfolio - but at what cost to the company's reputation

Last month, within thirty seconds of the BBC publishing a quotation from me on the latest round of the nymwars and Google+, my phone rang. Caller ID indicated that it was someone I know who works at Google. "Had I said something wrong?" was my first thought. I quickly retraced in my mind what it was

Inspired by the Europe v Facebook campaign and further motivated by revelations that individuals associated with WikiLeaks and the Occupy movements in Boston and New York have had their Twitter data disclosed to American law enforcement authorities, Privacy International is launching a campaign to

Gradually and almost imperceptibly, we have immersed ourselves in a global hypermedia environment. This environment increasingly contains everything we do: we work, we play, we organize within it. Our lives have been, in essence, turned inside out and dispersed in endless ethereal clouds - multi

Facebook's new "Download your Information" feature provides only a fraction of the personal information held by Facebook.

On the 2nd of August 2011 the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information has called on Facebook to delete the feature on the social networking site that automatically recognizes facial features and "tags" users when others upload photos of them. According to the local German

PI just received a response from Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland of the Council of Europe (CoE) stating that the CoE is refusing to start an investigation on the collection and storage of citizens biometric data by member states. On 31 March an international alliance of organisations and

An international alliance of organisations and individuals from 27 countries has lodged a petition calling on the Council of Europe to start an indepth survey on the collection and storage of biometric data by member states. European governments are increasingly demanding storage of biometric data

The Active Millimeter Wave body scanners that airport security officials plan to use in greater numbers after a failed attempt to explode a bomb in a plane over Detroit raise troubling questions about passenger privacy, and ultimately the technology’s utility as a security measure. While Privacy

Two months ago, the UK Borders Agency began fingerprinting foreign children over six years old, from outside the European Economic Area and resident in Britain. At the time Jacqui Smith was congratulated for her tough line on issuing identity cards to foreign residents and no one, not even

Privacy International's recent complaint to the UK Information Commissioner has threatened to bring to a halt an imminent plan to fingerprint all domestic and international passengers departing from Heathrow's Terminal 1 and Terminal 5, due to begin on March 27th. The British media is reporting that

The European Commission is about to announce the compulsory fingerprinting of all visitors to the EU, both visa holders and non-visa holders, along with automated border checks of EU nationals through the analysis of fingerprints and facial scans. The Communication from December 2007, available here

Dear Mr Schrank, I am writing with regard to the current controversy over the private arrangement between SWIFT and the U.S. Government that facilitates the extradition of confidential financial transaction data from SWIFT to U.S. authorities. You will be aware that Privacy International contends

The Criminal Justice Act 2003 further widens the circumstances in which a non-intimate sample may be taken from an individual. The Act merely requires that in order to take a non-intimate sample without consent, a person is arrested for a recordable offence - a significant advancement on the