Search
Content type: News & Analysis
13th June 2022
Last night, PI, Migrants Organise and Bail For Immigration Detainees joined forces to shine a light on the enduring plight of migrants in the UK who are subject to hardline and dehumanising Home Office policies.
Our joint light projection marked the 10 year anniversary of former Home Secretary Theresa’s May’s infamous 'hostile environment', a policy purposefully cruel that includes indefinite detention of migrants and refugees.
The past decade has also seen the steady creep of data sharing…
Content type: Report
23rd May 2022
Privacy International’s submissions for the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration inspection of the Home Office Satellite Tracking Service Programme
The Home Office have introduced 24/7 electronic monitoring and collection of the location data of migrants via GPS ankle tags. This seismic change cannot be overstated. The use of GPS tags and intention to use location data, kept for six years after the tag is removed, in immigration decision-making goes far beyond the mere…
Content type: Long Read
28th April 2022
Here are just 10 of our biggest achievements in 2021.
WE CHALLENGED COMPANIES TO CHANGE THEIR BUSINESS MODELS AND PRACTICES
In 2021 we effectively challenged big tech companies including Google, Facebook, Tecno, and smaller and equally urgent companies like Clearview AI, Web-IQ, Palantir etc. and achieved substantial impact including:
- Popular diet apps include better protections in their products
Many diet sites and apps ask you to take tests to create profiles of your body and eating…
Content type: Video
15th April 2022
Links
Italy fine
Our legal action
The ICO decision
Use of Clearview AI by police illegal under Belgian law, says Belgian interior minister
Clearview in Ukraine
Washington Post article
The pledge
Content type: News & Analysis
1st April 2022
The UK government has acknowledged that section 8(4) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (“RIPA”) (which has since been repealed) violated Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In relation to Article 10, it specifically acknowledged that the way in which security agencies handled confidential journalistic material violated fundamental rights protected by Article 10.
As part of a friendly settlement with two applicants, the UK government acknowledged…
Content type: Press release
25th March 2022
Today, the High Court ruled that the Home Secretary acted unlawfully and breached human rights and data protection laws by operating a secret, blanket policy of seizing, retaining and extracting data from the mobile phones of asylum seekers arriving by small boat.
This claim for judicial review was brought by three asylum seeking claimants: HM represented by Gold Jennings, and KA and MH represented by Deighton Pierce Glynn. The Claimants, like thousands of others arriving by small boat, all…
Content type: News & Analysis
25th March 2022
Background
Today judgment has been handed down in the landmark case of R (HM and MA and KH) v Secretary of State for the Home Department.
This is a Judicial Review decision concerning the UK Home Office’s secret and blanket policy of seizing mobile phones of all migrants who arrived to the UK by small boat between April 2020 and November 2020, and extracting data from all phones. PI was a third party intervener in the case.
The case revealed that migrants were searched on arrival at Tug Haven…
Content type: News & Analysis
18th March 2022
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
15th December 2021
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: News & Analysis
6th December 2021
What if we told you that every photo of you, your family, and your friends posted on your social media or even your blog could be copied and saved indefinitely in a database with billions of images of other people, by a company you've never heard of? And what if we told you that this mass surveillance database was pitched to law enforcement and private companies across the world?
This is more or less the business model and aspiration of Clearview AI, a company that only received worldwide…
Content type: Press release
30th November 2021
Today, following an in-depth investigation, the UK Competition and Market Authority (CMA) assessed that the competition concerns can only be addressed by Facebook selling Giphy in its entirety. This is a very significant decision. Facebook, the largest provider of social media sites and display advertising in the UK, acquired Giphy, the largest provider of GIFs. The merger would further increase Facebook’s dominance and Facebook would have benefitted from Giphy’s data collection practices and…
Content type: Video
25th November 2021
<br />
Links
Daniel's petition: https://www.change.org/p/uk-parliament-ban-advertisers-from-targeting-eating-disorders
PI's diet ads report: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/4603/unhealthy-diet-targeted-ads-investigation-how-diet-industry-exploits-our-data
More information on Instagram, targeted ads, and Frances Haugen - the Facebook whistleblower: https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/4622/reduce-facebooks-harms-teens-target-its-data-hungry-business-model…
Content type: Long Read
18th November 2021
Zimbabwe has a history of state led surveillance that is carried out more for political gain than for the investigation of legitimate criminal activities. During former President Mugabe’s 37 year rule the government used laws and state security structures to carry out targeted surveillance of persons of political interest and more generalised mass surveillance of the population.
Specific laws such as the Interception of Communications Act as well as mandatory SIM-card registration regulations…
Content type: Video
11th November 2021
<br />
You can find out more from Karisma here: https://web.karisma.org.co/
You can read the report here: https://web.karisma.org.co/useless-and-dangerous-a-critical-exploration-of-covid-applications-and-their-human-rights-impacts-in-colombia/
Content type: News & Analysis
15th October 2021
Update: Based on the complaint, on 30 November 2021 the Ombudsman opened an inquiry into whether the European Commission failed to take into account human rights concerns or carry out human rights impact assessments before providing support to African countries to develop surveillance capabilities.
___
Privacy International (PI) together with a coalition of human rights groups have today called on the European Ombudsman, the EU’s oversight body, to investigate evidence that the block is…
Content type: Long Read
15th October 2021
In early August, the African Union (AU) issued a statement condemning Denmark’s Aliens Act which, among other things, allows Demark to relocate asylum seekers to countries outside the European Union while their cases are being processed.
The AU argues that this amounts to an abdication by Denmark of “…its international responsibility to provide asylum and protection to those that enter its territory…’’ More importantly, the AU says this is an “extension of the borders of such countries and an…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th October 2021
Introduction
The European Parliament has adopted a nonbinding resolution against the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by law enforcement in public spaces and a ban on facial recognition databases, such as the ones used by Clearview AI.
It is a significant and hugely welcome step in an ongoing campaign to ensure the EU leads the world in protecting against dangerous applications of AI within its borders.
The Resolution recognises the need to safeguard against application of AI and mass…
Content type: News & Analysis
23rd September 2021
Photo by Emmanuel Olguín on Unsplash
After many denials and much distraction, the truth is out. According to Facebook’s own internal research, Instagram is toxic to teen girls’ mental health.
This week, the Wall Street Journal reported on a collection of internal Facebook documents which it says demonstrate how the platform is acutely aware of the harmful effects Instagram has on the mental health of teens. The Journal reported that Facebook’s own research showed that use of the image…
Content type: Long Read
9th September 2021
Introduction
Technology has driven a number of changes in the way that financial services are packaged and accessed by consumers. These changes have led to the rise of fintech, a data intensive industry that has been touted for its convenience and as an alternative to traditional financial services.
The current article looks at the use of digital loan Apps in Philippines and Kenya and contextualises the global discussions on fintech which we have been monitoring for some years. Research…
Content type: News & Analysis
19th August 2021
After almost 20 years of presence of the Allied Forces in Afghanistan, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in February 2020 on the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. A few weeks before the final US troops were due to leave Afghanistan, the Taliban had already taken control of various main cities. They took over the capital, Kabul, on 15 August 2021, and on the same day the President of Afghanistan left the country.
As seen before with regime…
Content type: News & Analysis
6th August 2021
Today Apple announced a set of measures aimed at improving child safety in the USA. While well-intentioned, their plans risk opening the door to mass surveillance around the world while arguably doing little to improve child safety.
Among the measures, Apple has announced that it is to introduce “on-device machine learning” which would analyse attachments for sexually explicit material, send a warning, and begin scanning every photo stored on its customers’ iCloud in order to detect child…
Content type: News & Analysis
23rd July 2021
What happened
On 22 July 2021, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) issued a declaration on our challenge to the UK bulk communications regime finding that section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984 (since repealed by the Investigatory Powers Act 2016) was incompatible with EU law human rights standards. The result of the judgment is that a decade’s worth of secret data capture has been held to be unlawful. The unlawfulness would have remained a secret but for PI’s work.
You can find…
Content type: Press release
22nd July 2021
Amnesty International, Privacy International and The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) have published a report uncovering NSO Group’s entire corporate structure, tracking the global money trail of both public and private investment into the lucrative spyware company.
Amnesty International and other rights groups have documented dozens of cases of NSO Group’s products being used by repressive governments across the world to put activists, journalists, and opposition…
Content type: News & Analysis
20th July 2021
Last month, the World Health Organization published its guidance on Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence for Health. Privacy International was one of the organisations that was tasked with reviewing the report. We want to start by acknowledging that this report is a very thorough one that does not shy away from acknowledging the risks and limitations of the use of AI in healthcare. As it is often the case with guidance notes of this kind, its effectiveness will depend on the…
Content type: Video
8th July 2021
<br />
Links
You can find the Co-win vaccination website here: https://www.cowin.gov.in/
You can support PI at pvcy.org/donate and you can find out more about the Centre for Internet and Society at https://cis-india.org/
CIS also have a podcast, it’s called In flux and you can find it on all your favourite podcast apps and at https://in-flux.cis-india.org/
Like and subscribe to the podcast on which ever platform you use. It’s also available on our website at…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th July 2021
This article was written by Abdías Zambrano, Public Policy Coordinator at IPANDETEC, and is adapted from a blog entry that originally appeared here.
Digital identity can be described as our digital personal data footprint, ranging from banking information and statistics to images, news we appear in and social network profiles, interactions with and in digital platforms, and information contained in private and public repositories. Our whole life is online, often leaving us with little choice…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th July 2021
Legislation to "strengthen the integrity of UK elections and protect our democracy" through the Elections Integrity Bill was introduced to parliament this week.
This legislation will require people, for the first time in Great Britain, to show a state-issued photo ID, such as a driving license or passport, in order to exercise their right to vote, perhaps by the 2023 General Elections. The changes would affect elections in England, Scotland and Wales while voters in Northern Ireland are already…
Content type: News & Analysis
6th July 2021
Around the world, we see migration authorities use technology to analyse the devices of asylum seekers. The UK via the Policing Bill includes immigration officers amongst those who can exercise powers to extract information from electronic devices. There are two overarching reasons why this is problematic:
The sole provision in the Policing Bill to extract information rests on voluntary provision and agreement, which fails to account for the power imbalance between individual and state. This…
Content type: News & Analysis
29th June 2021
It is difficult to imagine a more intrusive invasion of privacy than the search of a personal or home computer ... when connected to the internet, computers serve as portals to an almost infinite amount of information that is shared between different users and is stored almost anywhere in the world.
R v Vu 2013 SCC 60, [2013] 3 SCR 657 at [40] and [41].
The controversial Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill includes provision for extracting data from electronic devices.
The Bill…
Content type: News & Analysis
29th June 2021
Imagine going to a peaceful protest and having to show your ID to the police before you can join it. Or having to fill out a form about why you are attending that particular protest.
Sounds absurd, right? Surely we should all be free to protest, without the police knowing who we are?
But high tech surveillance of protests is real, and it enables the police to identify, monitor and track protestors, indiscriminately and at scale.
For example, your face is increasingly becoming your ID card…