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Content type: Examples
In 2018 a report from the Royal United Services Institute found that UK police were testing automated facial recognition, crime location prediction, and decision-making systems but offering little transparency in evaluating them. An automated facial recognition system trialled by the South Wales Police incorrectly identified 2,279 of 2,470 potential matches. In London, where the Metropolitan Police used facial recognition systems at the Notting Hill Carnival, in 2017 the system was wrong 98% of…
Content type: Examples
In May 2018, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement abandoned the development of machine learning software intended to mine Facebook, Twitter, and the open Internet to identify terrorists. The software, announced in the summer of 2017, had been a key element of president Donald Trump's "extreme vetting" programme and expected to flag at least 10,000 people a year for investigation. ICE decided instead to opt for a contractor who could provide training, management, and human personnel to do the…
Content type: Examples
Police investigating the 2016 rape and murder of a 19-year-old medical student were unable to search the iPhone of suspect Hussein Khavari, an Afghan refugee who declined to give them his password. The investigators gained access to the phone via a private company in Munich, and went through Apple's health app data to discern what kinds of activities Khavari participated in on the day of the murder. The app identified the bulk of his activity as "climbing stairs". An investigator of similar…
Content type: Examples
A new generation of technology has given local law enforcement officers in some parts of the US unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens. In Fresno, California, the police department's $600,000 Real Time Crime Center is providing a model for other such centres that have opened in New York, Houston, and Seattle over the decade between 2006 and 2016. The group of technologies used in these centres includes ShotSpotter, which uses microphones around the city to triangulate the…
Content type: Examples
In 2016 researchers in China claimed an experimental algorithm could correctly identify criminals based on images of their faces 89% of the time. The research involved training an algorithm on 90% of a dataset of 1,856 photos of Chinese males between 18 and 55 with no facial hair or markings. Among them were 730 ID pictures of convicted criminals or suspects wanted by the Ministry of Public Security. However, criminology experts warned that the results may merely reflect bias in the criminal…
Content type: Examples
A new generation of technology has given local law enforcement officers in some parts of the US unprecedented power to peer into the lives of citizens. The police department of Frenso California uses a cutting-edge Real Time Crime Center that relies on software like Beware.
As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The program also scoures billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social…
Content type: Long Read
TO TAKE PART IN OUR CAMPAIGN, RIGHT CLICK ON THE PICTURES BELOW, SAVE THEM, AND SHARE THEM ON SOCIAL MEDIA TAGGED #SPYPOLICE
Have you ever been to a peaceful protest, demo or march? Did you assume that the police would only be identifying 'troublemakers'? How would you feel if just by turning up at a peaceful protest, the police automatically identified you, without your consent or knowledge, and stored personal information about you (including photographs of your face) in a secret database?…
Content type: Press release
We found this picture here.
Privacy International has today a issued a formal complaint to the UK Information Commissioner about the police’s use of intrusive ‘mobile phone extraction’ technology, enabling them to download all of the content from a person’s phone — without a warrant, and whether they are suspect, witness or even victim of a crime. Further complaints have also been sent to the Home Office and the Independent Office for Police Conduct, calling for urgent reforms to a totally…
Content type: News & Analysis
This op-ed originally appeared in the New Statesman.
Imagine the police searching your home without good reason, without a warrant, without your knowledge. For good measure let’s also imagine that they take a full inventory of all of your possessions and store this in a secret database indefinitely.
A peculiar feature of modernity is that what we would find dystopian in the real world is banal in our virtual world. And the irony is that this can be a greater violation of our privacy and…
Content type: News & Analysis
This op-ed originally appeared in the Huffington Post.
As technologies used by the police race ahead of outdated legislation, we are left vulnerable to potential for misuse and abuse of our data
The vast quantities of data we generate every minute of the day and how it can be exploited is challenging democratic and societal norms. The use by UK police forces of technologies that provide access to data on our phones, which document everything we do, everywhere we go, everyone we interact with…
Content type: Press release
Key points:
Privacy International have today published a report entitled 'Digital Stop and search: how the UK police can secretly download everything from your mobile phone', based on Freedom of Information requests to 47 police forces across the UK about their use of 'mobile phone extraction' technologies, which enable them to download all the content and data from a mobile phone.
Police forces across the UK are secretly downloading data from the smartphones of people across…
Content type: Report
The ‘Digital stop and search’ report examines the use of ‘mobile phone extraction’ tools by the UK police, enabling them to download all of the content and data from people’s phones.
Privacy International have exposed a potentially unlawful regime operating with UK police forces, who are confused about the legal basis for the technology they are using. The police are acting without clear safeguards for the public, and no independent oversight to identify abuse and misuse of sensitive personal…
Content type: Explainer
What is the Global Surveillance Industry?
Today, a global industry consisting of hundreds of companies develops and sells surveillance technology to government agencies around the world. Together, these companies sell a wide range of systems used to identify, track, and monitor individuals and their communications for spying and policing purposes. The advanced powers available to the best equipped spy agencies in the world are being traded around the world. It is a…
Content type: Long Read
The era where we were in control of the data on our own computers has been replaced with devices containing sensors we cannot control, storing data we cannot access, in operating systems we cannot monitor, in environments where our rights are rendered meaningless. Soon the default will shift from us interacting directly with our devices to interacting with devices we have no control over and no knowledge that we are generating data. Below we outline 10 ways in which this exploitation and…