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Content type: News & Analysis
We’ve been warning for a while now about the risks of AI Assistants. Are these assistants designed for us or to exploit us?The answer to that question hinges on whether the firms building these tools are considering security and privacy from the outset. The initial launches over the last couple of years were not promising.Now with OpenAI’s agent launch, users deserve to know whether these firms are considering these risks and designing their service for people in the real world. The OpenAI…
Content type: Long Read
“Hey [enter AI assistant name here], can you book me a table at the nearest good tapas restaurant next week, and invite everyone from the book club?” Billions of dollars are invested in companies to deliver on this. While this is a dream that their marketing departments want to sell, this is a potential nightmare in the making.Major tech companies have all announced flavours of such assistants: Amazon’s Alexa+, Google’s Gemini inspired by Project Astra, Microsoft’s Copilot AI companion and…
Content type: Long Read
IntroductionIn early October this year, Google announced its AI Overviews would now have ads. AI companies have been exploring ways to monetise their AI tools to compensate for their eye watering costs, and advertising seems to be a part of many of these plans. Microsoft have even rolled out an entire Advertising API for its AI chat tools.As AI becomes a focal point of consumer tech, the next host of the AdTech expansion regime could well be the most popular of these AI tools: AI chatbots.…
Content type: News & Analysis
Banning TikTok? It's time to fix the out-of-control data exploitation industry - not a symptom of it
Chinese apps and tech companies have been at the forefront of the news recently. Following India's ban of 59 chinese apps in July, President Trump announced his desire to ban TikTok, shortly followed by his backing of Microsoft's intention to buy the US branch of its parent company ByteDance. Other than others lip syncing his public declaration, what does President Trump fear from this app, run by a firm, based in China?
It's all about that data
One clear answer emerges: the exploitation of…
Content type: Examples
Hours before OpenDemocracy filed suit to compel the UK government to release all the contracts governing its deals with a list of technology firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and Faculty, the UK government released the contracts. Faculty is being paid more than £1 million to provide AI services for the NHS, and the companies involved in the NHS data store project, including Faculty and Palantir, were originally granted intellectual property rights and were allowed to train…
Content type: Long Read
Photo by Cade Roberts on Unsplash
For those of you who don't spend the most productive part of your day scanning the news for developments about data and competition, here's what has been going on in the UK since summer 2019.
Basically, the UK competition authority started an investigation into online platforms and digital advertising last summer, and issued their preliminary findings in December 2019, concluding that Facebook and Google are very powerful in the search engine and social media…
Content type: News & Analysis
We found this image here.
Today, a panel of competition experts, headed by Professor Jason Furman, the former chief economic adviser of in the Obama administration, confirmed that tech giants, like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, do not face enough competition.
Significantly, the report finds that control over personal data by tech giants is one of the main causes preventing competition and ultimately innovation.
Privacy International's research has shown clear examples of…
Content type: Long Read
During the last World Economic Forum in Davos, the CEO of Microsoft joined the chorus of voices calling for new global privacy rules, saying the following in regard to the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):
“My own point of view is that it's a fantastic start in treating privacy as a human right. I hope that in the United States we do something similar, and that the world converges on a common standard."
We have come a long way. From tech companies fighting and…
Content type: Impact Case Study
What is the problem
Business models of lots of companies is based on data exploitation. Big Tech companies such Google, Amazon, Facebook; data brokers; online services; apps and many others collect, use and share huge amounts of data about us, frequently without our explicit consent of knowledge. Using implicit attributes of low-cost devices, their ‘free’ services or apps and other sources, they create unmatched tracking and targeting capabilities which are being used against us.
Why it is…
Content type: News & Analysis
Tuesday’s letter to Google CEO Larry Page, personally signed by 29 European data protection authorities, ordered the corporation (inter alia) to give users greater control over their personal information. The notions of trust and control are emphasised throughout the letter, and Google is urged to "…develop new tools to give users more control over their personal data" and "collect explicit consent for the combination of data for certain purposes". It is good news that the…
Content type: News & Analysis
APEC privacy activity has passed another milestone with the acceptance in July 2012 of the USA as the first economy to formally join the cross border privacy rules (CBPR) system. The CBPR Joint Oversight Panel (JOP), with the Canadian chair of the Data Privacy Subgroup (DPS) standing in for the US member in accordance with the ‘no conflict of interest’ provisions, accepted the US government application, which nominated the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as the privacy enforcement authority…
Content type: News & Analysis
In the PI office, we have daily debates about which platforms to use for our organizational operations. As a privacy charity, we are naturally concerned about the integrity of our own information services and resources, but we frequently receive queries about the best technologies to use from a variety of other organizations, some with very complex threat models.
The sad fact is that we are all poorly served by the range of services currently available. We worry that there is a significant…