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Content type: News & Analysis
What if we told you that every photo of you, your family, and your friends posted on your social media or even your blog could be copied and saved indefinitely in a database with billions of images of other people, by a company you've never heard of? And what if we told you that this mass surveillance database was pitched to law enforcement and private companies across the world?
This is more or less the business model and aspiration of Clearview AI, a company that only received worldwide…
Content type: News & Analysis
Photo by Emmanuel Olguín on Unsplash
After many denials and much distraction, the truth is out. According to Facebook’s own internal research, Instagram is toxic to teen girls’ mental health.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported on a collection of internal Facebook documents which it says demonstrate how the platform is acutely aware of the harmful effects Instagram has on the mental health of teens. The Journal reported that Facebook’s own research showed that use of the image…
Content type: Advocacy
Dear TECNO,
We, the undersigned, don’t believe that privacy should be a luxury. And yet, when TECNO manufacture and sell phones with an outdated operating system, that’s the world TECNO are helping to create.
Our recent investigation into the TECNO Y2 showed that at least one TECNO phone is currently on sale with an operating system that hasn’t received updates since 2013. We are concerned because this is leaving users vulnerable to hundreds of well-known and serious exploits.
The Y2 was…
Content type: Case Study
Behind their tecchie names, AddThis and ShareThis are simple services: they allow web-developers and less tech-savvy users to integrate social networking "share" buttons on their site. While they might also offer some additional services such as analytics, these tools gained traction mostly by providing an easy and free way to integrate Facebook, Twitter and other social networks share buttons. Anyone can use any of these service and in a few clicks be provided with a plugin for their site or a…
Content type: Long Read
Now more than ever with a global pandemic happening, our lives are being shaped by our interaction with the digital world. Work meetings on Zoom followed by Skype with family before a quick run with your favourite running app and a Google search for your next meal: technologies and services offer us a lot and greatly improve our daily lives. But what's the real cost of these tools we rely on so much?
A lot of these companies, especially those offering free services, collect data about you. It…
Content type: Examples
Article extract- translated from the original French.
"A political big data company with close ties to the federal liberals and which worked on Emmanuel Macron's campaign in France is setting up its head office in Old Montreal to continue its growth and take advantage of Montreal's digital vitality.
Data Sciences inc. (DS) was born from the victory of the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) in the last election. Tom Pitfield, a close friend of Justin Trudeau, was leading digital operations during…
Content type: News & Analysis
Email addresses
Acxiom: [email protected]
Criteo: [email protected]
Equifax: [email protected]
Experian: [email protected]
Oracle: https://oracle.ethicspointvp.com/custom/oracle/dp/en/form_data.asp
Quantcast: [email protected] cc: [email protected]
Tapad: [email protected]
Letter for Acxiom and Oracle
subject line: Right to Erasure Request
I am concerned your company exploits my data.
In accordance with my right[s] under the General Data…
Content type: News & Analysis
Our team wanted to see how data companies that are not used to being in the public spotlight would respond to people exercising their data rights. You have the right under the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") to demand that companies operating in the European Union (either because they are based here or target their products or services to individuals in the EU) delete your data within one month. We wrote to seven companies and requested that they delete our data, and we've made…
Content type: Press release
Today, Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK. Privacy International urges the data protection authorities to investigate these companies and to protect individuals from the mass exploitation of their data.
Our complaints target companies that, despite exploiting the data of millions of…
Content type: Advocacy
Today, Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK.
It’s been more than five months since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. Fundamentally, the GDPR strengthens rights of individuals with regard to the protection of their data, imposes more…
Content type: Advocacy
Today, Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK.
It’s been more than five months since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. Fundamentally, the GDPR strengthens rights of individuals with regard to the protection of their data, imposes more…
Content type: Long Read
It’s 15:10 pm on April 18, 2018. I’m in the Privacy International office, reading a news story on the use of facial recognition in Thailand. On April 20, at 21:10, I clicked on a CNN Money Exclusive on my phone. At 11:45 on May 11, 2018, I read a story on USA Today about Facebook knowing when teen users are feeling insecure.
How do I know all of this? Because I asked an advertising company called Quantcast for all of the data they have about me.
Most people will have never heard of…
Content type: News & Analysis
Around the world, from North America to Europe and Asia, governments are starting to roll out smart meters. While the technology promises increased energy efficiency through greater consumer control over energy consumption, smart meters also raise serious privacy concerns. Smart meters collect energy usage data at high frequencies - typically every five, fifteen or 30 minutes. That level of granularity reveals how much electricity is being used in a home and when, which in turn can paint an…
Content type: Long Read
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
In the midst of continued widespread public outrage at the US government’s brutal ‘zero-tolerance’ policy around immigration – multiple data and analytics companies have quietly avoided answering questions about their role in feeding the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s data backbone. These companies are bidding to work with an agency that has time and time again shown itself to be a brutal and problematic.
Privacy International…
Content type: Long Read
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 journalists to politicians.
The bigger picture is often lost when transparency is posed as the only solution to shadowy state and corporate powers. For one, the term is so broadly understood that it…
Content type: Long Read
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 newly launched magazine ROM. The interview was conducted by ROM publisher Khesrau Behroz and writers Patrick Stegemann and Milosz Paul Rosinski.
Frederike Kaltheuner, you work for Privacy…
Content type: Long Read
Yesterday the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) - which is responsible for ensuring people's personal data is protected - announced it intends to fine Facebook the maximum amount possible for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
This decision highlights of how serious and rampant misuse and exploitation of data is. Facebook is responsible and failed to comply with data protection 101: be upfront and honest about what you are doing with people's data.
Importantly, the ICO's…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International welcomes today’s decision by the United States Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States, which finds that the government must generally obtain a warrant when seeking mobile phone location records. In particular, PI applauds the Court’s recognition that “[m]apping a cell phone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts. As with GPS information, the timestamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s…
Content type: News & Analysis
This piece originally appeared here.
We are much more than our physical selves. We are also digital. Every moment we generate more data. Although sometimes this data is under our control, increasingly it is not. This uncontrolled data—this metadata—is often generated as a result of our interactions, movements, sentiments, and even our inaction. Despite being beyond our control, our metadata is still accessible to many. Hardly a day goes by without a news story or global event involving data: a…
Content type: Long Read
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, marketers, web trackers, and more – facilitate a hidden data ecosystem that collects, generates and supplies data to wide variety of beneficiaries. The beneficiaries of the ecosystem can include other…
Content type: Long Read
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 Russia are required by law to store the content of users’ communications for six months and the metadata of users’ communications for three years, essentially meaning that what a person does…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, US director of national intelligence James Clapper, backed by National Security Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers, warned Congress that the next phase of escalating online data theft is likely to involve manipulating digital information. Clapper and Rogers viewed this type of attack as more likely than a catastrophic event of digitally triggered damage to physical infrastructure. The pair believed that manipulating and deleting data would compromise data integrity and undermine…
Content type: Examples
Uber has closely studied how dynamic pricing functions and when it's acceptable to users. One discovery is that round numbers signal haste and sloppiness where riders appear to believe that more precise numbers (for example, 2.1 instead of 2) have been carefully worked out by an algorithm. The company's head of head of economic research Keith Chen says that riders will pay up to 9.9 times the normal price if their phone's battery is almost dead, information the Uber app openly collects in order…
Content type: Long Read
We found the image here.
When we browse the internet, go to work, drive down the street, go shopping, interact with institutions, or simply move through the city, data is collected about us.
Advanced profiling technologies answer questions we did not raise. They generate knowledge we did not anticipate, but are eager to apply. As knowledge is power, profiling changes the power relationships between the profilers and the profiled.
In a world where everything we do becomes more and more…
Content type: Long Read
As we said before, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandals are a wake-up call for policy makers. And also a global issue. People around the world are concerned by the exploitation of their data. The current lack of transparency into how companies are using people’s data is unacceptable and needs to be addressed.
There is an entire hidden ecosystem of companies harvesting and sharing personal data. From credit scoring and insurance quotations to targeted political communication, this…
Content type: Long Read
In December 2017, Privacy International published an investigation into the use of data and microtargeting during the 2017 Kenyan elections. Cambridge Analytica was one of the companies that featured as part of our investigation.
Due to the recent reporting on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, we have seen renewed interest in this issue and our investigation. Recently in March of 2018, Channel 4 News featured a report on micro targeting during the 2017 Kenyan Presidential Elections, and the…
Content type: Long Read
The ongoing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal is a wake-up call for UK policy-makers who too often encourage and promote digital industries over the protection people’s personal data. The scandal has shown that the public is concerned by companies’ exploitation of their data. The current lack of transparency into how companies are using people’s data is unacceptable and needs to be addressed.
Reform should not be limited to the behaviour of individual companies. Consumers are confronted…
Content type: Long Read
Over the past few days we've all learned details about how Cambridge Analytica was able to amass data on voters through the use of an app that would gather data on approximately 50 million Facebook users, including 30 million psychographic profiles.
This is three stories in one.
Yes, this is another story of data that has been exploited for political advantage, again. Political parties and governments continue to want access to social media intelligence and continue to develop profiles…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by Karisma Foundation
7:03: Catalina leaves her apartment and a security camera follows her down the hall, another one observes her in the elevator while she fixes her hair. As she exits the building, the warden tells her she doesn’t have to fix her hair because she is already pretty as she is. She gets to the parking lot where another two cameras look at her while she gets into her car.
8:00: She is heading to an open data workshop organized by the Colombian government in a…