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Content type: Press release
A European privacy group claimed today that dozens of amendments to the new Data Protection Regulation being proposed by Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are being copied word-for-word from corporate lobby papers, with MEPs frequently failing to even remember their own amendments. Max Schrems, of the website and campaign Europe v Facebook, noticed striking similarities between proposed amendments and lobby papers written by representatives of Amazon, eBay, the American Chamber of…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International has compiled data on the privacy provisions in national constitutions around the world, including which countries have constitutional protections, whether they come from international agreements, what aspects of privacy are actually protected and when those protections were enacted. We are pleased to make this information available under a Creative Commons license for organizations, researchers, students and the community at large to use to support their work (…
Content type: News & Analysis
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? Twitter, once the darling of the privacy world, seems to have lost its way.
Datasift don't believe that there are any privacy implications to their new service. In fact, they didn't…
Content type: News & Analysis
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-verses - that follow us around in extra dimensionality. “Big Data” refers to the endless digital grains of sand we produce as we move, think and act. Internet Service Providers, web hosting companies,…
Content type: News & Analysis
Independent security researcher Trevor Eckhart revealed yesterday that a recent software update to some HTC smartphones has accidentally given third party applications access to huge amounts of private data, including call logs, geolocation history, SMS data and a whole lot more.
The update surreptitiously installs a suite of applications logging users' interactions with their devices. When a device is first switched on, the user ostensibly has the option not to allow HTC to…
Content type: Press release
The global watchdog Privacy International has today simultaneously filed complaints against Google's controversial Gmail service with privacy regulators in sixteen countries.
The move creates Google's biggest challenge yet in the short but turbulent public debate over its new email service.
Complaints have been filed with the privacy and data protection regulators of France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Poland,…