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Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In February 2019, the World Food Programme, a United Nations aid agency, announced a five-year, $45 million partnership with the data analytics company Palantir. WFP, the world's largest humanitarian organisation focusing on hunger and food security, hoped that Palantir, better known for partnering with police and surveillance agencies, could help analyse large amounts of data to create new insights from the data WFP collects from the 90 million people in 80 countries to whom it distributes 3…
Content type: Examples
7th May 2019
The rise of social media has also been a game changer in the tracking of benefits claimants. In the UK in 2019, a woman was jailed after she was jailed for five months after pictures of her partying in Ibiza emerged on social media. She had previously sued the NHS for £2.5 million, after surviving a botched operation. She had argued the operation had left her disabled and the “shadow of a former self” but judges argued that the pictures suggested otherwise.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/…
Content type: Examples
7th May 2019
The rise of social media has also been a game changer in the tracking of benefits claimants. Back in 2009, the case of Nathalie Blanchard a woman in Quebec who had lost her disability insurance benefits for depression because she looked “too happy” on her Facebook pictures had made the news.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/woman-loses-insurance-benefits-facebook-pics/story?id=9154741
Author: Ki Mae Heussner
Publication: ABC News
Content type: Examples
13th November 2019
A woman was killed by a spear to the chest at her home in Hallandale Beache, Florida, north of Miami, in July. Witness "Alexa" has been called yet another time to give evidence and solve the mystery. The police is hoping that the smart assistance Amazon Echo, known as Alexa, was accidentally activated and recorded key moments of the murder. “It is believed that evidence of crimes, audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo that occurred in the main bedroom … may be found on…
Content type: Examples
9th February 2019
In 2018, WhatsApp founder Brian Acton responded to the Cambridge Analytica scandal by tweeting "It is time. #deletefacebook." He also left the company, walking away from $850 million in unvested stock rather than accede to Facebook's plans to add advertising and commercial messaging, a purpose at odds with WhatsApp's encrypted environment. In 2014, Acton and his co-founder Jan Koum, sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $22 billion. Acton's wanted instead to monetise WhatsApp by charging users tiny…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2019
Virginia Eubanks explains what we can draw from understanding the experience of surveillance of marginalised groups: it is a civil rights issue, technologies carry the bias of those who design them, people are resisting and why we need to move away from the privacy rights discourse.
https://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publication: The American Prospect
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2019
In the United States, monitoring efforts to combat public benefits fraud are often part of a broader approach that focuses on stigmatizing people receiving benefits and reducing their number, rather than ensuring that the maximum number of people who are eligible receive benefits. However, fraud constitutes less than 1% of the benefits disbursed through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which are also known as food stamps, and less than 2% of unemployment insurance payments…
Content type: Examples
25th February 2019
In 2018, Wells Fargo disclosed that due to a computer bug that remained undiscovered for nearly five years 600 customers were granted more expensive mortgage loans than they could have qualified for. About 400 of them went on to lose their homes. The announcement reignited the public anger and distrust created by the bank's 2016 fake accounts scandal, which was attributed to a hard-driving, aggressive, pervasive sales culture that is difficult to change.
https://www.ft.com/content/dbc1d692-…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In December 2018 Walmart was granted a patent for a new listening system for capturing and analysing sounds in shopping facilities. The system would be able to compare rustling shopping bags and cash register beeps to detect theft, monitor employee interactions with customers, and even listen to what customers are saying about products. The company said it had no plans to deploy the system in its retail stores. However, the patent shows that, like the systems in use in Amazon's cashier-less Go…
Content type: Examples
17th May 2019
A vulnerability in Amadeus, the customer reservation system used by 144 of the world's airlines, was only superficially patched after a team reported the vulnerability in 2018. As a result, an attacker could alter online strangers' Passenger Name Records, which contain all the details of the passengers and flights, and are used by government security agencies to check against the no-fly list. Bug hunter Noam Rotem discovered that a web script hosted by individual airlines accepts passengers'…
Content type: Examples
9th February 2019
In 2018, the Berlin-based researcher Hang Do Thi Duc concluded after analysing more than 200 million public transactions made in 2017 that anyone can track the purchase history of a user of the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo. By accessing the data via an open API, Do Thi Duc was able to view the names, transaction dates, and messages sent with payment for all users who hadn't changed their settings to private. Venmo's default setting is "public", and does not clearly highlight how to change it…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
As early as 2008, the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE began helping Venezuela develop a system similar to the identity system used in China to track social, political, and economic behaviour. By 2018, Venezuela was rolling out its "carnet de la patria", a smart-card "fatherland" ID card that was being increasingly linked to the government-subsidised health, food, and other social programmes most Venezuelans relied on for survival. In 2017, Venezuela hired ZTE to build a comprehensive…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2019
Research from the Brennan Center shows minorities are primarily affected by new laws that restrict citizens access to voting through ID requirement, increased distance to polling station, inconvenient opening hours and hidden costs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/18/voter-id-poor-black-americans
Writer: Ed Pilkington
Publication: The Guardian
Content type: Examples
13th August 2019
In 2018, repossession services in the US were experiencing a boom in business as the number of Americans failing to keep up with their car payments reached its highest point since 2012. One of these, Ohio-based Relentless Recovery, was increasing its hit rate by equipping its agents' vehicles with cameras to help it build a database of every license plate in the state along with the locations where the vehicles may be easily found. Repo agents collect most of the billions of license plate scans…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
A December 2018 report prepared by the Oxford Internet Institute's Computational propaganda Research Project and the network analysis firm Graphika for the US Senate Intelligence Committee found that the campaign conducted by Russia's Internet Research Agency during the 2016 US presidential election used every major social media platform to deliver messages in words, images, and videos to help elect Donald Trump - and stepped up efforts to support him once he assumed office. The report relied…
Content type: Examples
17th May 2019
In 2016, Jamie Siminoff, the CEO of the miniature security camera company Ring, emailed his employees information them that the company would adopt a new mission to fight crime by using consumer electronics. The company, which Amazon acquired in 2018, sells its cameras with a social app, "Neighbors", which allows customers to watch their own property and share information about alleged criminality and suspicious individuals with the rest of the people on their block. Ring's hyper-connected…
Content type: Examples
14th April 2019
Facebook's latest tool for inspecting political ads showed that in the run-up to the US mid-term elections in November 2018, many of the same politicians who had been questioning Facebook about privacy and leaked user data were spending campaign funds on advertisements on the service. Between 2014 and 2018, the digital percentage of political spending rose from 1% to 22% (or about $1.9 billion); between May and November 2018 political spending on Facebook and its subsidiaries came to nearly $…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
New workplace technologies are generating mountains of data on workers despite a lack of clarity over how the data is used and who owns it. In offices, smart badges track interactions and sensors track fitness and health; in trucks sensors monitor drivers' performance in the name of safety. In the US state of Illinois, between July and October 2017 26 lawsuits were filed by employees alleging that their employers had violated the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires a…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In November 2018, 112 civil liberties, immigrant rights groups, child welfare advocates, and privacy activists wrote a letter to the heads of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security demanding an immediate halt to the HHS Office for Refugee Resettlement's practice of using information given them by detained migrant children to arrest and deport their US-based relatives and other sponsors. The policy began in April 2018, and the result has been that…
Content type: Examples
12th July 2019
US Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) used social media monitoring to track groups and people in New York City associated with public events opposing the Trump administration’s policies, including ones related to immigration and gun control. The investigative branch of ICE created and circulated a spreadsheet, entitled ‘Anti-Trump Protest Spreadsheet 07/31/2018,” that provided details of events planned between July 31, 2018, and August 17, 2018. The spreadsheet pulled data from…
Content type: Examples
12th July 2019
The US government created a database of more than 50 journalists and immigrant rights advocates, many of whom were American citizens, associated with the journey of migrants travelling from Central America to the Mexico-US border in late 2018. Officials from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US Border Patrol, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had access to this database. This list allowed the…
Content type: Examples
25th February 2019
In May 2018, Slice Technologies, which provides the free Unroll.me email management service in return for data-mining individuals' email inboxes, announced it would discontinue offering its service in Europe rather than comply with the incoming General Data Protection Regulation. Unroll.me's privacy policy claims the right to share users' information with a range of third parties, and the company is known to have provided statistics about its users' Lyft receipts to Uber.
https://techcrunch.…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In November 2018 reports emerged that immigrants heading north from Central America to the US border are more and more often ensuring they are accompanied by children because "family units" are known to be less likely to be deported, at least temporarily, and smugglers charge less than half as much when a minor is in the group because their risk is less. Some parents have given their children - sometimes for cash - to other adults such as a relative, godparent, or, sometimes, unrelated person.…
Content type: Examples
7th May 2019
In this interview (podcast and transcript) Virginia Eubanks discuss three case studies from her book Automating Inequality to illustrate how technology and data collection negatively impact people in vulnerable situation.
The (failed) attempt to automate and privatise the welfare system elligibility management in the state of Indiana in 2006.
The use of a coordinated entry system in Los Angeles County to address homelessness.
The Allegheny Family Screening Tool that attempts to predict…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2019
The vast majority of public benefits programs in the United States—Supplemental Security Income, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Housing Assistance—do not take the form of cash transfers. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program provides limited cash transfers to families, and it is dependent on families disclosing extensive personal information to…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In October 2018, in response to questions from a committee of MPs, the UK-based Student Loans Company defended its practice of using "public" sources such as Facebook posts and other social media activity as part of the process of approving loans. In one case earlier in the year, a student was told that a parent's £70 Christmas present meant the student did not qualify for a maintenance loan without means testing because it meant the student was not estranged from their family. SLC insisted…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In December 2018, a report, "Access to Cash", written by the former financial ombusdsman Natalie Ceeney and independent from but paid for by the cash machine network operator Link, warned that the UK was at risk of sleepwalking into a cashless society and needed to protect an estimated 8 million people (17% of the British population) who would become disadvantaged as a result. Although cash used halved between 2007 and 2017, and debit cards passed cash in share of retail transactions in 2017,…
Content type: Examples
9th February 2019
A flaw in the official 2018 UK Conservative Party conference app granted both read and write access to the private data of senior party members, including cabinet ministers, to anyone who logged in by second-guessing the email address they used to sign into the app. Twitter users claimed that one leading politician, Boris Johnson, had his avatar briefly replaced by a pornographic image, while another, Michael Gove, had his replaced by that of media magnate Rupert Murdoch. The app was created by…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In November 2018 the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission warned that asylum seekers have been deterred from seeking medical help in Scotland and Wales since the UK government began forcing the English NHS to charge upfront in 2017 and by fears that medical personnel will comply with Home Office orders to forward their data. The commission, along with health charities and the Labour and LibDem political parties, called for the policy to be suspended. The Home Office policy of moving asylum…
Content type: Examples
12th August 2019
In December 2018, in the wake of the Windrush scandal, the National Police Council, which represents police chiefs across England and Wales agreed to cease passing on to deportation authorities information about people suspected of being in the country illegally. The measures also ban officers from checking the police national computer solely to check on immigration status. Police said they believed that their too-close relationship with immigration authorities in aid of the government's "…