Search
Content type: Long Read
IntroductionData about our health reveals some of the most sensitive, intimate - and potentially embarrassing - information about who we are. Confidentiality is, and has always been, at the very heart of medical ethics. People need to be able to trust their doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers so that they are not afraid to tell them something important about their health for fear of shame, judgement or social exclusion.It’s no surprise then that data protection regimes around…
Content type: Advocacy
In our submission we outline our concerns with the industry as a result of extensive technical research and complaints taken to data protection authorities in Europe as a result.
Data brokers must specifically be included in "actors in scope."
We recommend that "data brokers" are specifically included in the list of "actors in scope". A data broker is a company that collects, buys and sells personal data and this is often how they earn their primary revenue. It is a term that is entering…
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:
"A meaty first report by the UK parliamentary committee that’s been running an inquiry into online disinformation since fall 2017, including scrutinizing how people’s personal information was harvested from social media services like Facebook and used for voter profiling and the targeting of campaign ads — and whose chair, Damian Collins — is a member of the UK’s governing Conservative Party, contains one curious omission.
Among the many issues the report raises are privacy…
Content type: Examples
Article extract:
"Ireland's two largest anti-abortion campaigns are facing questions over privacy after a BuzzFeed News analysis found that personal user data gathered by both of their apps can be shared with an international network of conservative and religious groups that includes the US National Rifle Association.
The Save the 8th campaign and the LoveBoth Project are at the forefront of the campaign to prevent the repeal of the Eighth Amendment of Ireland's constitution – which makes…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International announces the launch of two reports as part of its work on Defending Democracy and Dissent.
The report Online Political Ads: A study of inequality in transparency standards builds on our 2019 research findings and delves into the adverse impacts of non-existent or limited transparency on democracy based on two case-studies developed by our partners InternetLab and ELSAM.
The report, Micro-Targeting in Political Campaigns,…
Content type: Report
This paper examines the various legal frameworks governing micro-targeting in political campaigns in six states: Canada, Brazil, France, Italy, Spain and the UK. It aims to assess national practices as well as point out gaps in their respective frameworks. The paper commences by examining how micro-targeting is defined and thereafter examines the legal provisions applicable to micro-targeting activities.
To do this in an accessible way, the paper follows and analyses the series of activities…
Content type: News & Analysis
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.…
Content type: News & Analysis
Back in June, we published our investigation into Facebook brands, highlighting how Facebook failed to provide its users with a fair and meaningful understanding of how targeted advertising operated on its platform, and a number of issues preventing users from exercising their rights to the fullest possible extent. In face of the serious gaps encountered, we published an open letter to Facebook drawing attention to four main issues as well as our recommended actions to tackle them. This letter…
Content type: News & Analysis
In September 2019, PI published the report Your Mental Health for Sale. Our investigation looked into popular mental health websites and their data sharing practices.
Our findings suggest that, at the time of the research, most websites we looked at were using third party tracking for advertising purposes, sometimes relying on programmatic advertising technologies such as Real Time Bidding (RTB), sharing personal data with potentially thousands of actors. Some websites were also found sharing…