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Content type: News & Analysis
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
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: Long Read
(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).
Content type: Long Read
The Privacy International Network is celebrating Data Privacy Week, where we’ll be talking about how trends in surveillance and data exploitation are increasingly affecting our right to privacy. Join the conversation on Twitter using #dataprivacyweek.
In the era of smart cities, the gap between the internet and the so-called physical world is closing. Gone are the days, when the internet was limited to your activities behind a desktop screen, when nobody knew you were a dog.
Today, the…
Content type: Long Read
TO TAKE PART IN OUR CAMPAIGN, RIGHT CLICK ON THE PICTURES BELOW, SAVE THEM, AND SHARE THEM ON SOCIAL MEDIA TAGGED #SPYPOLICE
Have you ever been to a peaceful protest, demo or march? Did you assume that the police would only be identifying 'troublemakers'? How would you feel if just by turning up at a peaceful protest, the police automatically identified you, without your consent or knowledge, and stored personal information about you (including photographs of your face) in a secret database?…
Content type: News & Analysis
This op-ed originally appeared in the New Statesman.
Imagine the police searching your home without good reason, without a warrant, without your knowledge. For good measure let’s also imagine that they take a full inventory of all of your possessions and store this in a secret database indefinitely.
A peculiar feature of modernity is that what we would find dystopian in the real world is banal in our virtual world. And the irony is that this can be a greater violation of our privacy and…
Content type: News & Analysis
This op-ed originally appeared in the Huffington Post.
As technologies used by the police race ahead of outdated legislation, we are left vulnerable to potential for misuse and abuse of our data
The vast quantities of data we generate every minute of the day and how it can be exploited is challenging democratic and societal norms. The use by UK police forces of technologies that provide access to data on our phones, which document everything we do, everywhere we go, everyone we interact with…
Content type: Press release
Key points:
Privacy International have today published a report entitled 'Digital Stop and search: how the UK police can secretly download everything from your mobile phone', based on Freedom of Information requests to 47 police forces across the UK about their use of 'mobile phone extraction' technologies, which enable them to download all the content and data from a mobile phone.
Police forces across the UK are secretly downloading data from the smartphones of people across…