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Content type: Advocacy
10th March 2013
This stakeholder report is a joint submission by Privacy International (PI) and the Law and Technology Centre of the University of Hong Kong (HKU). PI is a human rights organisation that works to advance the right to privacy and fight surveillance around the world. PI has been working with HKU to conduct research and policy engagement on privacy and data protection issues in China and Hong Kong since 2009. Together, PI and HKU wish to bring concerns about the protection and promotion of the…
Content type: News & Analysis
14th August 2018
This piece originally appeared here.
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
Tech competition is being used to push a dangerous corporate agenda.
High-tech industries have become the new battlefield as the United States and China clash over tariffs and trade deficits. It’s a new truism that the two countries are locked in a race for dominance in artificial intelligence and that data could drive the outcome.
In this purported race for technological high ground, the argument often goes, China…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
The Chinese company Tencent has issued a statement denying that it stores or analyses communications sent over WeChat, the country's most popular messaging platform after Geely Automobile chairman Li Shufu claimed there was no data privacy in China at a business forum. Shufu also claimed that Tencent chairman Pony Ma was "definitely looking at our WeChat messages every day". Under the Chinese government's rules, all social media groups are required to store user records. Although relatively…
Content type: Long Read
17th July 2018
Privacy International (PI) has today released a new report, 'Teach 'em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance', showing how countries with powerful security agencies are training, equipping, and directly financing foreign surveillance agencies.
Spurred by advances in technology, increased surveillance is both powered by and empowering rising authoritarianism globally, as well as attacks on democracy, rights, and the rule of law.
As well as providing a background to the issue, the report…
Content type: Report
17th July 2018
Countries with powerful security agencies are spending literally billions to equip, finance and train security and surveillance agencies around the world — including authoritarian regimes. This is resulting in entrenched authoritarianism, further facilitation of abuse against people, and diversion of resources from long-term development programmes.
Privacy International's report 'Teach 'em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance' examines this problem closely, providng examples from US, China…
Content type: News & Analysis
12th December 2016
This piece originally appeared in the Responsible Data Forum.
Would you mind if, every time you post a comment on Twitter, Facebook or another social media platform, the police logged it? I mean, it’s public — surely it’s fair game?
If you think that’s OK, then maybe it’s also OK for a police officer to follow you when you walk down a busy street. That’s also public, right?
Clearly, definitions of public and private become very problematic when you are communicating with potentially…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th March 2011
Skype has consistently assured that it protects its users and their communications. Having reviewed the company's technology and policies we have grounds for concern about Skype's overall level of security, and we believe there are a number of questions to which the company must respond. Skype's misleading security assurances continue to expose users around the world to unnecessary and dangerous risk. It's time for Skype to own up to the reality of its security and to take a leadership position…
Content type: News & Analysis
3rd July 2013
Privacy International this week submitted stakeholder reports to the United Nations Human Rights Council1 about the human rights records of China, Senegal and Mexico. The reports, prepared in preparation with our partners in the respective countries, analyse the extent to which the right to privacy is respected and protected, and detail instances of privacy violations.
The stakeholder reports will inform the questions asked by members of the Human Rights Council when China, Senegal and Mexico…
Content type: Press release
17th July 2018
Privacy International has today released a report that looks at how powerful governments are financing, training and equipping countries — including authoritarian regimes — with surveillance capabilities. The report warns that rather than increasing security, this is entrenching authoritarianism.
Countries with powerful security agencies are spending literally billions to equip, finance, and train security and surveillance agencies around the world — including authoritarian regimes. This is…
Content type: Press release
9th February 2018
Below is a joint statement from Privacy International and Bytes for All.
This Friday, 27 September, marks the conclusion of the 24th session of the UN Human Rights Council, a session which has, for the first time, seen issues of internet surveillance in the spotlight. Privacy International and Bytes for All welcome the attention given at the Human Rights Council to this issue. However, we are concerned about developments which took place that threaten privacy rights and freedom of expression,…
Content type: Examples
2nd May 2018
According to the US security firm Statfor the Chinese government has been builsing a system to analyse the massive amounts of data it has been collecting over the past years. The company claims: "The new grid management system aims to help the Chinese government act early to contain social unrest. Under the new program, grid administrators each monitor a number of households (sometimes as many as 200). They then aggregate their reports into one enormous surveillance database, where it is…
Content type: News & Analysis
2nd December 2019
This creates a restraint on all people who merely seek to do as people everywhere do: to communicate freely.
This is a particularly worrying development as it builds an unreliable, pervasive, and unnecessary technology on top of an unnecessary and exclusionary SIM card registration policy. Forcing people to register to use communication technology eradicates the potential for anonymity of communications, enables pervasive tracking and communications surveillance.
Building facial recognition…
Content type: Examples
1st December 2017
By 2017, facial recognition was developing quickly in China and was beginning to become embedded in payment and other systems. The Chinese startup Face++, valued at roughly $1 billion, supplies facial recognition software to Alipay, a mobile payment app used by more than 120 million people; the dominant Chinese ride-hailing service, Didi; and several other popular apps. The Chinese search engine Baidu is working with the government of popular tourist destination Wuzhen to enable visitors to…
Content type: Advocacy
11th July 2016
Privacy International has today written to Danish ministers and authorities seeking urgent assurances following a report published two days ago in Information showing that the government has approved the export of an internet surveillance system to China.
The report, which relies in part on documents obtained from the Danish Business Authority – the department which oversees exports of surveillance technology – shows that the government has authorised a company based in Denmark to export an…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th July 2016
Privacy International has today written to Danish ministers and authorities seeking urgent assurances following a report published two days ago in Information showing that the government has approved the export of an internet surveillance system to China.
The report, which relies in part on documents obtained from the Danish Business Authority – the department which oversees exports of surveillance technology – shows that the government has authorised a company based in Denmark to export an…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In February 2018, police in China began using connected sunglasses equipped with facial recognition to scan crowds looking for suspected criminals. In a test at a busy train station in the city of Zhengzhou, police were able to identify and apprehend seven suspects accused of crimes ranging from hit-and-run to human trafficking. Police also identified 26 people using fake IDs, according to the Communist Party's People's Daily Newspaper. The glasses allow police officers to take a photograph of…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2016 researchers in China claimed an experimental algorithm could correctly identify criminals based on images of their faces 89% of the time. The research involved training an algorithm on 90% of a dataset of 1,856 photos of Chinese males between 18 and 55 with no facial hair or markings. Among them were 730 ID pictures of convicted criminals or suspects wanted by the Ministry of Public Security. However, criminology experts warned that the results may merely reflect bias in the criminal…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In January 2018 the Cyberspace Administration of China summoned representatives of Ant Financial Services Group, a subsidiary of Alibaba, to rebuke them for automatically enrolling its 520 million users in its credit-scoring system. The main complaint was that people using Ant's Alipay service were not properly notified that enrolling in the credit-scoring system would also grant Ant the right to share their personal financial data, including information about their income, savings, and…
Content type: Examples
21st September 2020
Several of the Chinese companies producing personal protective equipment such as face masks were shown via undercover video footage to be using Uighur labour under a government labour transfer programme that pays regional subsidies for each worker taken in. The equipment is being shipped all over the world, including to the US and Latin America. In the course of the pandemic, the number of companies producing PPE in Xinjiang has risen from four to 51. At Medwell, one such company, Uighurs are…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In a 2017 study of patterns of postings on Chinese social media, three Harvard researchers disagreed with the widespread claim that the government's strategy is to post "50c party" posts that argue for the government's side in policy and political debates. Instead, the researchers estimated that the Chinese government fabricates as many as 448 million social media comments a year but found that these avoid controversial issues and arguments with government skeptics. Instead, the researchers…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
In 2015, Ant Financial, a Chinese company affiliated with Alibaba, began deploying "Sesame Credit scores". Ant, which also runs the popular payment app Alipay, claims that it uses both online and offline purchasing and spending habits to calculate a credit worthiness score for each of its more than 350 million users. Users who meet various thresholds qualify for bonuses such as small loans or waivers on deposits. Almost as soon as the system went live, users of popular social media apps such as…
Content type: Examples
22nd March 2020
Among the Chinese companies making efforts to help the country respond to the coronavirus are the technology giants Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, Xiaomi, and Foxconn. In order to fight misinformation, Baidu created a map layer on top of its standard Map App that shows real-time locations of confirmed and suspected cases of the virus so that people can avoid hot spots. Qihoo 360 has launched a platform travellers can use to check if anyone on their recent train or plane trips has since…
Content type: Examples
China: Manufacturer Telepower adds fever detection and facial recognition to point-of-sale terminals
21st March 2020
According to a company announcement, Telepower Communication (Telpo), a leading Chinese manufacturer of smart point-of-sale systems and intelligent hardware, has integrated into its terminals new features to support a wide variety of contactless use cases. The company’s family of terminals for catering, retail, payment, security, and other applications, include biometric, fever-detecting facial recognition, and ticket validation technology. The technology supports accurate identification of up…
Content type: Examples
22nd March 2020
The Chinese Communist Party has worked to control the narrative and deflect blame during the coronavirus crisis by drawing on its state and CCP-owned media to disseminate content via its English-language Facebook pages and Twitter feed (even though these platforms are banned in China). China has emphasised rapid recovery and successful treatments, as well as positive stories about efforts such as building makeshift hospitals at speed. Later stories also seek to position China as a world leader…
Content type: Examples
19th March 2020
Software on smartphones dictates whether an individual should be quarantined. Chinese citizens in 200 cities, beginning with Hangzhou, are required to install the Alipay Health Code app, developed by Hangzhou's local government with the help of Alipay owner Ant Financial, on their smartphones. After users fill in a form with personal information including name, national ID number, contact information, and details of recent travel, the software generates a QR code in one of three colors. Green…
Content type: Examples
18th March 2020
Software on smartphones dictates whether an individual should be quarantined. Chinese citizens in 200 cities, beginning with Hangzhou, are required to install the Alipay Health Code app, developed by Hangzhou's local government with the help of Alipay owner Ant Financial, on their smartphones. After users fill in a form with personal details, the software generates a QR code in one of three colors. Green enables its holder to move about unrestricted. Those with yellow codes may be asked to stay…
Content type: Examples
19th March 2020
China's airport screening, which includes scanning all arriving passengers for fever using “noncontact thermal imaging” since late January and requiring passengers to report their health status on arrival, look reassuring but won't stop the spread of the novel coronavirus because experience with other diseases shows it's very rare for screeners to detect infected passengers (even where they exist) and it has little impact on the course of an outbreak when they do. Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist…
Content type: Examples
5th May 2018
In the remote western city Xinjiang, the Chinese government is using new technology and humans to monitor every aspect of citizens' lives. China, which has gradually increased restrictions in the region over the last ten years in response to unrest and violent attacks, blames the need for these measures on the region's 9 million Uighurs. This Muslim ethnic minority make up nearly half of the region's population, and the government accuses them of forming separatist groups and fuelling…
Content type: Case Study
30th August 2017
For those concerned by reporting of Facebook’s exploitation of user data to generate sensitive insights into its users, it is worth taking note of WeChat, a Chinese super-app whose success has made it the envy of Western technology giants, including Facebook. WeChat has more than 900 million users. It serves as a portal for nearly every variety of connected activity in China. Approximately 30% of all time Chinese users spend on the mobile internet centers around WeChat and over a third of…
Content type: Examples
2nd May 2018
In 2016, the Big Data lab at the Chinese search engine company Baidu published a study of an algorithm it had developed that it claimed could predict crowd formation and suggested it could be used to warn authorities and individuals of public safety threats stemming from unusually large crowds. The study, which was inspired by a New Year's Eve 2014 stampede in Shanghai that killed more than 30 people, correlated aggregated data from Baidu Map route searches with the crowd density at the places…