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Content type: Long Read
26th January 2023
The rise of the gig-economy, a way of working relying on short term contracts and temporary jobs rather than on an employed workforce, has enabled the growth of a number of companies over the last few years. But without the rights that comes with full employment, gig economy workers today don't have access to essential protections.
In 2021, PI worked with ACDU and Worker Info Exchange to shed a light on the power imbalance between workers and gig economy platforms, exposing how workers find…
Content type: Long Read
22nd August 2022
Introduction
In response to the unprecedented social, economic, and public health threats posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Bank financed at least 232 "Covid-19 Response" projects. The projects were implemented across countries the World Bank classifies as middle and low-income.
This article will focus on eight (8) Covid-19 Response projects which sought to deliver social assistance to individuals and families on a "non-contributory" basis (this means that the intended beneficiaries…
Content type: Advocacy
28th June 2022
In our submission we outline our concerns with the industry as a result of extensive technical research and complaints taken to data protection authorities in Europe as a result.
Data brokers must specifically be included in "actors in scope."
We recommend that "data brokers" are specifically included in the list of "actors in scope". A data broker is a company that collects, buys and sells personal data and this is often how they earn their primary revenue. It is a term that is entering…
Content type: Examples
14th June 2021
During the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020, US police took advantage of a lack of regulation and new technologies to expand the scope of people and platforms they monitor; details typically emerge through lawsuits, public records disclosures, and stories released by police department PR as crime prevention successes. A report from the Brennan Center for Justice highlights New York Police Department threats to privacy, freedom of expression, and due process and the use of a predator…
Content type: News & Analysis
20th May 2021
On May 18th 2021 Google held its annual developer conference, Google I/O, where the company announces a number of innovations, products and software updates that will hit the market in the months to come. Among these announcements, the company introduced Android 12, its latest mobile Operating System (OS), that came with headline grabbing privacy features.
Possibly trying to catch up with Apple, which is positioning itself as a privacy-friendly tech company and gave the adtech industry a kick…
Content type: Video
5th March 2021
Links
Find more of Dr Thompson's work and her book 'An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-Century America'
Or you can find her on twitter
You can see the 'Good and Bad heads' picture in her article 'Rediscovering “Good” and “Bad” Heads in the Phrenological Present'
Find out more about Physogs and Photofit in Courtney's article in Endeavour
You can listen to our podcast on Facial Recognition
And you can support us
You can listen and subscribe to the…
Content type: Case Study
28th January 2021
Your phone is the ideal profit tool for data brokers and advertisers: it's always in your pocket and can be used both as a means of collecting information and serving you ads based on that information. But how does this data collection happen through your apps?
Most, if not all, apps on our phones use Software Development Kits (SDKs). SDKs themselves are not trackers, but they are the means through which most tracking through mobile apps occurs. These kits are provided by third parties and…
Content type: Case Study
28th January 2021
Behind their tecchie names, AddThis and ShareThis are simple services: they allow web-developers and less tech-savvy users to integrate social networking "share" buttons on their site. While they might also offer some additional services such as analytics, these tools gained traction mostly by providing an easy and free way to integrate Facebook, Twitter and other social networks share buttons. Anyone can use any of these service and in a few clicks be provided with a plugin for their site or a…
Content type: Long Read
28th January 2021
Now more than ever with a global pandemic happening, our lives are being shaped by our interaction with the digital world. Work meetings on Zoom followed by Skype with family before a quick run with your favourite running app and a Google search for your next meal: technologies and services offer us a lot and greatly improve our daily lives. But what's the real cost of these tools we rely on so much?
A lot of these companies, especially those offering free services, collect data about you. It…
Content type: Examples
21st January 2021
Article extract- translated from the original French.
"A political big data company with close ties to the federal liberals and which worked on Emmanuel Macron's campaign in France is setting up its head office in Old Montreal to continue its growth and take advantage of Montreal's digital vitality.
Data Sciences inc. (DS) was born from the victory of the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) in the last election. Tom Pitfield, a close friend of Justin Trudeau, was leading digital operations during…
Content type: Long Read
20th January 2021
Among the many challenges of 2020, the impact on elections around the world kept us all on the edge of our seats. 75 countries postponed national and local elections due to Covid 19. Of the elections that went ahead, we saw Covid safe measures at polling stations (South Korea led the way forward in April) an increase in postal voting (who can forget the USA, but also Poland) and political parties in Uganda conducting "virtual" campaigns as mass rallies and in person campaign meetings were…
Content type: News & Analysis
17th December 2020
Today, the European Commission has concluded its Phase II in-depth review of the proposed acquisition of the health and fitness tracker Fitbit by Google, deciding that the merger can go through. While we welcome the commitments put forward by Google to mitigate some risks of compromising individuals' rights and competition, PI considers the effects of this merger will further strengthen Google's capacity to exploit our data.
On 15 June 2020, Google formally notified the European Commission of…
Content type: Frequently Asked Questions
27th October 2020
On 27 October 2020, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a report into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) - Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes.
After our initial reaction, below we answer some of the main questions regarding this report.
Content type: News & Analysis
27th October 2020
Privacy International (PI) welcomes today's report from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes. As a result, the ICO has ordered the credit reference agency Experian to make fundamental changes to how it handles people's personal data within its offline direct marketing services.
It is a long overdue enforcement action against Experian.
Read our Q&A on the report here.…
Content type: News & Analysis
24th September 2020
Back in June, we published our investigation into Facebook brands, highlighting how Facebook failed to provide its users with a fair and meaningful understanding of how targeted advertising operated on its platform, and a number of issues preventing users from exercising their rights to the fullest possible extent. In face of the serious gaps encountered, we published an open letter to Facebook drawing attention to four main issues as well as our recommended actions to tackle them. This letter…
Content type: News & Analysis
Banning TikTok? It's time to fix the out-of-control data exploitation industry - not a symptom of it
4th August 2020
Chinese apps and tech companies have been at the forefront of the news recently. Following India's ban of 59 chinese apps in July, President Trump announced his desire to ban TikTok, shortly followed by his backing of Microsoft's intention to buy the US branch of its parent company ByteDance. Other than others lip syncing his public declaration, what does President Trump fear from this app, run by a firm, based in China?
It's all about that data
One clear answer emerges: the exploitation of…
Content type: Video
23rd June 2020
Immediately following the UK general election in December 2019, we worked with Open Rights Group to commission a YouGov poll about public understanding and public opinion about the use of data-driven campaigning in elections.
The poll used a representative sample of 1,664 adults across the UK population.
'Data-driven political campaigning' is about using specific data about you to target specific messages at you. So, for this might involve knowing that you are, for example, likely to have…
Content type: Long Read
16th June 2020
Introduction
In August 2019, when Facebook announced a few new features for advertisers such as ads in search, PI decided to take an in-depth look at what features the company offers its users when it comes to understanding its advertising practices. One of these features, which caught our attention is Facebook Ads Preference, a tool that among other things, lists businesses/advertisers that have uploaded your personal data to target you with (or exclude you from) ads on the platform.
Content type: News & Analysis
15th June 2020
For the past few weeks, people across the world, starting in the US, have taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, a victim of police brutality. The protests, which are organised by and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have also become a platform to protest against state sponsored violence and systematic racism against black people.
The majority of articles and media focus have so far focused on what happens during the protest, namely an increasingly militarised…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th June 2020
Yesterday, Amazon announced that they will be putting a one-year suspension on sales of its facial recognition software Rekognition to law enforcement. While Amazon’s move should be welcomed as a step towards sanctioning company opportunism at the expense of our fundamental freedoms, there is still a lot to be done.
The announcement speaks of just a one-year ban. What is Amazon exactly expecting to change within that one year? Is one year enough to make the technology to not discriminate…
Content type: News & Analysis
22nd May 2020
GDPR was hard won. PI, together with other civil society actors, fought from the beginning for a version of the law that offers the strongest rights and protections in the face of intense industry lobbying.
Holding the hidden data ecosystem to account
Two years ago, we committed to using GDPR to seek to hold to account the hidden data ecosystem - those companies that amass and exploit large amounts of our data for profit.
Here’s some of the action we’ve taken:
In Nov 2018, after months of…
Content type: Case Study
7th May 2020
The run up to Kenya’s 2017 elections was extremely tense. Kenya has a history of violently fought elections and there was fear this election would be no different. It was in this tense environment, that companies like Cambridge Analytica and Harris Media – and their digital offerings - got involved in the election campaigns.
Cambridge Analytica’s business model is by now familiar, they compiled a huge amount of data points, often through illegal means, to create profiles on individuals –…
Content type: Long Read
1st May 2020
Photo by Cade Roberts on Unsplash
For those of you who don't spend the most productive part of your day scanning the news for developments about data and competition, here's what has been going on in the UK since summer 2019.
Basically, the UK competition authority started an investigation into online platforms and digital advertising last summer, and issued their preliminary findings in December 2019, concluding that Facebook and Google are very powerful in the search engine and social media…
Content type: Examples
1st April 2020
An engineering and computer science professor and his team from The Ohio State University discovered a design flaw in low-powered Bluetooth devices that leaves them susceptible to hacking.
Zhiqiang Lin, associate professor of computer science and engineering at the university, found the commonly used Bluetooth Low Energy devices, such as fitness trackers and smart speakers, are vulnerable when they communicate with their associated apps on the owner’s mobile phone.
"There is a fundamental…
Content type: Long Read
24th February 2020
In 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook announced the “Download Your Information” feature allowing users to download all the information that the company have on them since the creation of the account. All of it? It doesn’t seem so. Concerns were quickly raised when Facebook released the feature, that the information was inaccurate and incomplete.
Privacy International recently tested the feature to download all ‘Ads and Business’ related information (You can accessed it…
Content type: Case Study
24th February 2020
In 2015, a man in Connecticut was charged with murdering his wife based on evidence from her Fitbit. Richard Dabate, the accused, told the police that a masked assailant came into the couple’s suburban home at around 9am on 23 December 2015, overpowering Dabate then shooting his wife as she returned through the garage.
However, the victim’s fitness tracker told a different story. According to data from the device, which uses a digital pedometer to track the wearer’s steps, Dabate’s wife was…