Search
Content type: Long Read
22nd July 2022
In the wake of the recent news of the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the ruling of Roe v Wade in its ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization, headlines have been dominated by conversations around privacy and fears of how the criminalisation of abortion care and surveillance by law enforcement will play out in a tech driven world.
This discussion is increasingly important as governments move towards digitising their healthcare systems and as more individuals choose to…
Content type: News & Analysis
17th December 2021
The notorious Clearview AI first rose to prominence in January 2020, following a New York Times report. Put simply, Clearview AI is a facial recognition company that uses an “automated image scraper”, a tool that searches the web and collects any images that it detects as containing human faces. All these faces are then run through its proprietary facial recognition software, to build a gigantic biometrics database.
What this means is that without your knowledge, your face could be stored…
Content type: News & Analysis
6th December 2021
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: Video
2nd December 2021
<br />
Links
Read more about the ICO's provisional decision
Support our work
You can find out more about Clearview by listening to our podcast: The end of privacy? The spread of facial recognition
Content type: Press release
29th November 2021
In what could be seen as one of the strongest sanctions against the company in Europe, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is tasked with enforcing data protection legislation in the UK, has today announced its provisional intent to issue a potential fine of £17 million against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI.
Clearview AI, which only received worldwide attention following a New York Times report back in January 2020, is a company whose business model…
Content type: Long Read
4th August 2021
For many, browsing the internet or checking social media comes with its fair share of being targeted with ads selling “fad diet” subscription-based programmes, magic weight-loss powders, or promising a secret trick to lose weight quickly. Some of the products and programmes sold have been described as scams, with a very real impact for those suffering from eating disorders and those who fall prey to these ads. This is even more problematic due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has seen the…
Content type: Long Read
25th May 2021
On 25 May 2021, the European Court of Human Rights issued its judgment in Big Brother Watch & Others v. the UK. Below, we answer some of the main questions relating to the case.
After our initial reaction, below we answer some of the main questions relating to the case.
NOTE: This post reflects our initial reaction to the judgment and may be updated.
What’s the ruling all about?
In a nutshell, one of the world’s most important courts, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th March 2021
Unwanted Witness’ research into Safeboda highlighted the company’s failure to comply with some of the law's core data protection principles, with a number of implications for the exercise of data subject rights. The enforcement action against Safeboda by National Information Technology Authority, Uganda (NITA-U) requires the company to make fundamental changes to how they handle people's personal data in order to comply with the Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019.
This first landmark…
Content type: News & Analysis
4th February 2021
Today, the Constitutional Court of South Africa in a historic judgment declared that bulk interception by the South African National Communications Centre is unlawful and invalid.
The judgment is a confirmation of the High Court of South Africa in Pretoria’s powerful rejection of years of secret and unchecked surveillance by South African authorities against millions of people - irrespective of whether they reside in South Africa.
The case was brought by two applicants, the amaBhungane Centre…
Content type: News & Analysis
8th January 2021
Today, the UK High Court has quashed a decision by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) and held that section 5 of the Intelligence Services Act (ISA) 1994 does not permit the issue of general warrants to authorise property interference and certain forms of computer hacking.
The Court referred to cases dating back to the 18th century, which demonstrate the common law’s insistence that the Government cannot search private premises without lawful authority even in the national security…
Content type: News & Analysis
27th October 2020
Privacy International (PI) welcomes today's report from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes. As a result, the ICO has ordered the credit reference agency Experian to make fundamental changes to how it handles people's personal data within its offline direct marketing services.
It is a long overdue enforcement action against Experian.
Read our Q&A on the report here.…
Content type: Long Read
Q&A: EU's top court rules that UK, French and Belgian mass surveillance regimes must respect privacy
6th October 2020
Content type: Long Read
21st September 2020
An edited version of this article was originally published on the EDRi website in September 2020.
Introduction
Monopolies, mergers and acquisitions, anti-trust laws. These may seem like tangential or irrelevant issues for privacy and digital rights organisations. But having run our first public petition opposing a big tech merger, we wanted to set out why we think this is an important frontier for people's rights across Europe and indeed across the world.
In June, Google notified the…
Content type: News & Analysis
18th August 2020
Back in January, Privacy International and over 50 other organisations wrote to Google asking the company to take action over pre-installed apps that cannot be deleted (often known as “bloatware”), which can leave users vulnerable to their data being collected, shared and exposed without their knowledge or consent. Thousands of people from over 50 countries signed our petition supporting this ask. We welcome the constructive conversations we had with Google following this campaign and for the…
Content type: News & Analysis
6th August 2020
No doubt this is turning out to be a summer full of news about internet companies' digital dominance.
In June, Google notified the European Commission of its plan to acquire Fitbit - a plan that we immediately identified would raise grave concerns for our well-being as consumers.
Today the European Commission has made its decision. And it's good news.
The European regulator has decided to undertake a detailed 'Phase 2' investigation, rather than just green light Google's plans, voicing also the…
Content type: News & Analysis
26th June 2020
At a time where the mass surveillance of protests has been at the forefront, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights released a timely report on the impact of new technologies on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of assemblies, including peaceful protests.
The new report highlights the strong ties between protest and privacy and warns that “…the use of some such technologies to surveil or crack down on protesters can lead to human rights violations, including…
Content type: Case Study
25th June 2020
The Ugandan government has a running contract with the Chinese tech giant, Huawei, to supply and install CCTV cameras along major highways within the capital, Kampala, and other cities.
While details of the contract remain concealed from the public, the Uganda Police Force (UPF) released a statement, simply confirming its existing business partnership for telecommunication and surveillance hardware, and software between the security force and Huawei. However, it is not clear whether the…
Content type: Long Read
13th May 2020
This article has been written by our partner organisation InternetLab. Read this article in Portuguese here.
Over the last months, the organisation InternetLab has researched privacy, data protection, gender, and social protection, focusing on the beneficiaries of the Bolsa Familia Program (PBF). The PBF is the most extensive Brazilian cash transfer program, and its functioning is linked to CadÚnico, a database that comprises 40% of the country’s population. Moreover, it is a program whose…
Content type: News & Analysis
13th March 2020
Almost a year and a half ago we complained about seven companies to three data protection authorities in Europe. These companies, ranging from AdTech to data brokers and credit rating agencies, thrive on the collection, exploitation and processing of personal data. They profile and categorise people - without our knowledge and infringing multiple legal requirements.
Now, the French Data Protection Authority CNIL has informed us that they are following the same route and launching an…
Content type: News & Analysis
3rd March 2020
This piece was originally published by Unwanted Witness here.
Today marks exactly one year since Uganda passed its data protection law, becoming the first East African country to recognize privacy as a fundamental human right, as enshrined in Art 27 of the 1995 Uganda Constitution as well as in regional and International laws.
The Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 aims to protect individuals and their personal data by regulating processing of personal information by state and non-state…
Content type: Long Read
24th February 2020
Background
Kenya’s National Integrated Identity Management Scheme (NIIMS) is a biometric database of the Kenyan population, that will eventually be used to give every person in the country a unique “Huduma Namba” for accessing services. This system has the aim of being the “single point of truth”, a biometric population register of every citizen and resident in the country, that then links to multiple databases across government and, potentially, the private sector.
NIIMS was introduced as…
Content type: Long Read
24th February 2020
This piece was written by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, who are policy officers at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in India. The piece was originally published on the website Economic Policy Weekly India here.
In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices…
Content type: Report
6th February 2020
The changes discussed in this article are based on a second analysis performed in late November, 3 months after the original study Your Mental Health is for Sale and following the exact same methodology. All data collected can be found at the bottom of this page.
Change is possible
Back in September 2019 we published the report Your Mental Health is for Sale exposing how a majority of the top websites related to mental health in France, Germany and the UK share data for advertising purposes.…
Content type: News & Analysis
6th February 2020
On 30 January 2020, Kenya’s High Court handed down its judgment on the validity of the implementation of the National Integrated Identity Management System (NIIMS), known as the Huduma Namba. Privacy International submitted an expert witness testimony in the case. We await the final text of the judgment, but the summaries presented by the judges in Court outline the key findings of the Court. Whilst there is much there that is disappointing, the Court found that the implementation of NIIMS…
Content type: Advocacy
29th January 2020
We welcome the effort by the Government of Kenya to give life to and specify the right to privacy, already enshrined in Article 31(c) and (d) of the Constitution of Kenya by proposing a draft Data Protection Act. We particularly appreciate the direct reference to this Constitutional right in the purpose of the Act and the way it is referred to on several occasions in the Act.
While these efforts have positive intentions and we are pleased that Kenya has adopted a comprehensive data protection…
Content type: News & Analysis
15th January 2020
Today Advocate General (AG) Campos Sánchez-Bordona of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), issued his opinions (C-623/17, C-511/18 and C-512/18 and C-520/18) on how he believes the Court should rule on vital questions relating to the conditions under which security and intelligence agencies in the UK, France and Belgium could have access to communications data retained by telecommunications providers.
The AG addressed two major questions:
(1) When states seek to impose…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th January 2020
Send a Freedom of Information Request to your local police for to see if they are using cloud extraction here.
On 12 December 2018 a member of Lancashire Police Department UK told viewers of a Cellebrite webinar that they were using Cellebrite's Cloud Analyser to obtain cloud based 'evidence'. In response to a Freedom of Information request Hampshire Constabulary told Privacy International they were using Cellebrite Cloud Analyser.
They are not alone. In Cellebrite's 2019 Annual Trend Survey…
Content type: Advocacy
19th November 2019
As any data protection lawyer and privacy activist will attest, there’s nothing like a well-designed and enforced data protection law to keep the totalitarian tendencies of modern Big Brother in check.
While the EU’s data protection rules aren’t perfect, they at least provide some limits over how far EU bodies, governments and corporations can go when they decide to spy on people.
This is something the bloc’s border control agency, Frontex, learned recently after coming up with a plan to…
Content type: Long Read
22nd October 2019
The pressing need to fix our cybersecurity (mis)understandings
Despite all the efforts made so far by different, cybersecurity remains a disputed concept. Some states are still approving cybersecurity laws as an excuse to increase their surveillance powers. Despite cybersecurity and cybercrime being different concepts, the confusion between them and the broad application of criminal statutes is still leading to the criminalise legitimate behaviour.
All of this represents a sizable challenge…