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Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International has today submitted comments to a U.S. government consultation on whether the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should keep the social media details of individuals travelling to the US in so-called “Alien Files” documenting all immigrants.
We’ve urged that they don’t, and that they review and stop all similar social media surveillance by the DHS.
The systematic surveillance of social media is an increasingly dangerous trend …
Content type: Case Study
Our connected devices carry and communicate vast amounts of personal information, both visible and invisible.
What three things would you grab if your house was on fire? It’s a sure bet your mobile is going to rank pretty high. It’s our identity, saying more about us than we perhaps realise. It contains our photos, calendar, internet browsing, locations of where we go, where we’ve been, our emails, social media. It holds our online banking, notes with half written poems, shopping lists, shows…
Content type: News & Analysis
Humanitarian agencies are collecting personal information for Syrians caught in the crossfire of a drawn-out and bloody civil war. Indeed, refugees fleeing persecution and conflict, need to access services and protection offered by the world’s humanitarian community. But in the rush to provide necessary aid to those afflicted by the crisis in Syria, humanitarian organisations are overlooking a human right that also needs protecting: the right to privacy.
Humanitarian and aid agencies are…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International today is proud to announce our new project, Aiding Privacy, which aims to promote the right to privacy and data protection in the development and humanitarian fields. Below is an outline of the issues addressed in our new report released today, Aiding Surveillance.
New technologies hold great potential for the developing world. The problem, however, is that there has been a systematic failure to critically contemplate the potential ill effects of deploying technologies in…
Content type: Report
The US does not have a general overarching privacy law like European Data Directive or the sweeping privacy protections contained in the European declarations of rights. The EU-US accord cites several laws, which it claims, give privacy rights to non-US persons. None of the cited laws offer any real substantive or procedural protections for Europeans. As explained below, the one law – the Privacy Act 5 U.S.C 552a – that could offer some modest protections is tellingly not even mentioned.
But…
Content type: Report
This is a memo prepared by Barry Steinhardt of Friends of Privacy USA for Members of the European Parliament regarding the proposed EU-US Agreement PNR.
The proposed agreement regarding Passenger Name Records (PNR) between the United States and the European Union is riddled with faulty assertions and assumptions about US law and the actual operations of the US government.
These faulty assertions and assumptions go to the heart of the agreement and undercut the claims of protections for…
Content type: News & Analysis
Few understand why we focus on refugee privacy. Funders don’t understand it so don’t fund it; the public see the plight of refugees as seen on TV, not as a privacy issue; and often times the international community does everything it can to increase scrutiny of refugees. In this blog, I highlight the privacy issues facing refugees and how these issues can jeopardize refugees’ safety as much as any of the environmental, social, or political risks refugees encounter.
Refugees are amongst…
Content type: News & Analysis
Together with a coalition with 18 Japanese rights groups, Privacy International today delivered a letter to the Japanese Minister of Justice to protest against the implementation of a fingerprinting system and face-scanning system at its borders. All visitors and many foreign residents to Japan will be fingerprinted under this plan. Our letter to the Minister is endorsed by 68 organisations from 30 countries. In our letter, we show that there are numerous problems with the government's plans.…
Content type: News & Analysis
In a tipping of the hat to the Americans, the UK is set to establish the largest border surveillance programme to date. The new programme will involve the collection of biometrics on visitors to the UK, the generation of vast information stores on all Britons and visitors, and a profiling system to identify those worthy of further scrutiny.
This programme does not merely apply to combatting terrorism however; it is for use for general policing matters.
We have archived the 'partial'…