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Content type: News & Analysis
In the midst of the atrocious war currently being waged by Russia on Ukraine, on 14 March 2022 Reuters reported that Clearview AI, the infamous online surveillance company, had offered its services to the Ukrainian defense ministry. A day later in an interview for TechCrunch, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister for Digital Transformation confirmed that the partnership with Clearview AI was "currently in very early development".
Clearview is an online surveillance company that collects…
Content type: Explainer
Following sustained reporting by researchers, journalists and activists around the world, including recent disclosures exposed by the PegasusProject, the surveillance industry is facing scrutiny like never before.
In the latest move, eighteen U.S. lawmakers have today demanded that the U.S. government imposes sanctions on four non-US surveillance companies for, as they mention in their letter, facilitating “disappearance, torture and murder of human rights activists and journalists”.
The move…
Content type: Long Read
In a previous article, we mapped the influence of the Chinese company Huawei across the world and how their sales of smart city infrastructures are contributing to the reshaping of our public space.
We should be alarmed by some of their product deployments – such as the installation of facial recognition technologies in countries with concerning human rights records. But also the deployments of facial recognition technology in countries without strong data protection laws are as such…
Content type: Long Read
The smart city market is booming. And with a booming market comes companies that are profiting and reshaping our public space, like the Chinese tech company Huawei.
While the term ‘Smart City’ is a broad one that encompasses many different initiatives, some with little to no impact on our privacy and other rights. Certain issues are nevertheless recurrent: the lack of transparency around public-private partnerships, the absence of consultation, and the appetite for a “tech quick fix…
Content type: News & Analysis
On June 9th, in light of the global debate against racial injustices, the company IBM announced they would stop selling facial recognition. In a letter to the US congress, they demanded a “national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”
It is worth noting first of all that it is not entirely clear that IBM is actually stopping facial recognition. The letter states that "IBM no longer offers general purpose IBM facial…
Content type: Impact Case Study
What is the problem
For over two decades we have been documenting an alarming use and spread of surveillance. It is no longer just the wars on terror or drugs or migration that is driving this trend. The management of health crises and distribution of welfare regularly are among others being used to justify this turn to increasingly invasive forms of surveillance. From country to country we see the same ideas and the same profiteers expanding their reach.
When we first released our report on…