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Content type: Long Read
CEOs of the big tech companies have all recently discovered the value of privacy. On Tuesday, 30 April 2019, Mark Zuckerberg, announced his future plans to make Facebook a "privacy-focused social platform". This was followed by Google's Sundar Pichai demand that “privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world.” Meanwhile, Twitter's Jack Dorsey, has described the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as "net-positive", while Apple had already positioned itself as the champion of…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, the cybersecurity company Trend Micro found that at least 29 beauty and photo editing apps that had been downloaded more than 4 million times from Google's Play Store included code that pushed full-screen ads for fraudulent or pornography content or that directed users to phishing sites by making them believe they had won a contest. A second group of camera apps that claimed to improve photos actually uploaded them to a remote server controlled by the app developer and then…
Content type: Long Read
Image Source: "Voting Key" by CreditDebitPro is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Democratic society is under threat from a range of players exploiting our data in ways which are often hidden and unaccountable. These actors are manifold: traditional political parties (from the whole political spectrum), organisations or individuals pushing particular political agendas, foreign actors aiming at interfering with national democratic processes, and the industries that provide products that …
Content type: News & Analysis
The first half of 2018 saw two major privacy moments: in March, the Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, followed in May by the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") taking effect. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, as it has become known, grabbed the attention and outrage of the media, the public, parliamentarians and regulators around the world - demonstrating that yes, people do care about violations of their privacy and abuse of power. This scandal has been one of…
Content type: Examples
According to research conducted by Ronan Chardonneau, a French associate professor of digital marketing at Angers University, none of the websites of the eleven candidates' in the 2017 French presidential elections, that he looked into respected CNIL's directives regarding information that should be available on the website and consent requirements for data collection. According to this research, nine of the candidates used Google Analytics, without activating the option to anonymize data…
Content type: Advocacy
This week a public debate on facial recognition will take place in Westminster Hall.
Following a public request for comment by Darren Jones MP (Science and Technology Committee), we sent our responses to the questions asked.
Below you can find the integral content of our letter.
1. Would you consent to the police scanning your face in a crowd to check you’re not a criminal?
Facial recognition technology uses cameras with software to match live footage of people in public with…
Content type: Explainer
It’s tough to minimise targeted ads on phones because ads can be delivered based on data from the device level (such as what operating system your phone is using or based on unique numbers that identify your phone), browser level (what you search for within a browser), and within the apps you use. An app could target ads at you based on your location (tied to your unique device id number(s)) for example. Apps, including Instagram, direct you to opt-out of targeted ads at the device level.…
Content type: News & Analysis
Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Between 23 and 26 May 2019 Europeans will be voting to elect members of the European Parliament.
Since the last elections in 2014, much has changed within and without the European Union: the rise of nationalism and Euroscepticism, the protracted armed conflict in Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea by Russia, the new political orientation of the United States, just to name a few.
Among the new challenges facing these elections is…
Content type: Long Read
“Truth exists, but you have to find it”, Oleksandra Matviychuk of Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties told me as I interviewed her in central Kyiv one week before the 2019 Ukrainian run-off election, “and in order to do so you have to make some effort”. We’re talking about her experience working on the ground in Ukraine, a country with a long history of battling against disinformation.
Activists in Ukraine have long experience navigating the noisy and chaotic environment that disinformation…
Content type: Long Read
This image was found here.
Spain is holding a national general election on April 28 (its third in four years). Four weeks later Spaniards will again go to the polls to vote in the European Parliament elections. At Privacy International we are working to investigate and challenge the exploitation of people’s data in the electoral cycle including in political campaigns. This includes looking at the legal frameworks governing the use of data by political parties and their…
Content type: News & Analysis
Image: Anatomy of an AI system: a map of the many processes — extracting material resources, data, and human labor — that make an Amazon Echo work. Credit: Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler
With over 6.3 million Amazon Echo devices worldwide, there is a good chance these constantly active devices will record criminal behavior.
Bloomberg, who recently reported on yet another creepy feature, that Amazon workers are listening to what you tell Alexa, were told by workers…
Content type: Examples
A startling amount of the internet is fake in one way or another, studies found in 2018. Less than 60% of web traffic is human; a 2013 study found that at least half of YouTube traffic was bots masquerading as people; in November 2018 the US Justice Department revealed that eight people were accused of stealing $36 million in digital advertising fraud that involved sending fake traffic to spoofed websites which were made to look to advertisers like premium publishers. Also fake in at least some…
Content type: Examples
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
In the run-up to the May 2019 European Parliament elections, Google announced it would launch a new set of transparency tools to combat voter manipulation. Before being allowed to buy advertising on Google platforms, campaigns will be required to verify their identity, and approved ads will be required to display the identity of their purchaser. Google will build a real-time searchable database of all political ads and show their purchasers, costs, and demographics. Facebook announced similar…
Content type: News & Analysis
PI has today written to Google, Instagram, Snapchat, TicTok, Twitter, YouTube, and WhatsApp to ask for more information about their steps to tell people why they are seeing ads. Facebook recently announced expanding the company's ad transparency measures to include more information about why an ad or content appears in a user's newsfeed. While Facebook has a lot more to do, it is important that all technology companies provide advertising transparency.
Recently, we have seen how platforms…
Content type: News & Analysis
We found this image here.
Today, a panel of competition experts, headed by Professor Jason Furman, the former chief economic adviser of in the Obama administration, confirmed that tech giants, like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, do not face enough competition.
Significantly, the report finds that control over personal data by tech giants is one of the main causes preventing competition and ultimately innovation.
Privacy International's research has shown clear examples of…
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: Virtual Machine
The documentation below is a copy of the documentation found on Github: Interception environment on Github
Privacy International's data interception environment
Version: 2.1.2-20190730
Privacy International's data interception environment
Quick Start Guide
Step 0 - Prerequisites
Step 1 - Download
Step 2 - Importation
Step 3 - Initialising
Step 4 - Setup
Step 5 - Capture
Step 6 - Notes for Android Nougat or Later
Background
Theory
Implementation
Virtualbox (6.0.4)
Debian 10 (Buster)…
Content type: News & Analysis
In December 2018, we revealed how some of the most widely used apps in the Google Play Store automatically send personal data to Facebook the moment they are launched. That happens even if you don't have a Facebook account or are logged out of the Facebook platform (watch our talk at the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Leipzig or read our full legal analysis here).Today, we have some good news for you: we retested all the apps from our report and it seems as if we…
Content type: Examples
In June 2018, a panel set up to examine the partnerships between Alphabet's DeepMind and the UK's NHS express concern that the revenue-less AI subsidiary would eventually have to prove its value to its parent. Panel chair Julian Huppert said DeepMind should commit to a business model, either non-profit or reasonable profit, and noted the risk that otherwise Alphabet would push the company to use its access to data to drive monopolistic profits. In that case, DeepMind would either have to…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International welcomes the focus on data and privacy contained in the final report by the UK House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (DCMS) on Disinformation and ‘fake news’. Beyond our control, companies and political parties have banded together to exploit our data. This report establishes essential steps to remedying this downward spiral. An important part of the democratic process is freedom of expression and right to political participation, including the right…
Content type: Examples
In September 2018, Google was discovered to be prototyping a search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, designed to comply with China's censorship regime. Among other features, Dragonfly would tie users' searches to their personal phone numbers, ensuring the government could track their queries. Among the terms on Google's Mandarin-language blacklist: "human rights", "student protest", and "Nobel prize". One Google source suggested Dragonfly would also force on users potentially manipulated Chinese-…
Content type: Examples
In September 2018, the attorney general of the US state of New Mexico filed suit against Lithuania-based Tiny Lab Productions claiming that the maker of the children's app Fun Kid Racing had violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (1998) by collecting location and other data about the children playing the game. The suit also included online ad businesses run by Google, Twitter, and three other companies, arguing that Google's inclusion of the app in the family section of its Play…
Content type: Examples
In 2017, Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs began a collaboration with Waterfront Toronto intended to turn a 12-acre lakeside area into a "smart city" equipped with sensors and responsive infrastructure. Frustration that Torontonians' data privacy concerns were not being addressed led Saadia Muzaffar, founder of TechGirls Canada, to resign from Waterfront Toronto's Digital Strategy Advisory Panel in October 2018. In a lengthy resignation letter, she called attention to the risk that embedding poorly…
Content type: Long Read
During the last World Economic Forum in Davos, the CEO of Microsoft joined the chorus of voices calling for new global privacy rules, saying the following in regard to the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR):
“My own point of view is that it's a fantastic start in treating privacy as a human right. I hope that in the United States we do something similar, and that the world converges on a common standard."
We have come a long way. From tech companies fighting and…
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.
It is no mystery that data exploitation is part of most consumer-oriented tech companies’ business models. A big part of our lives is recorded and exploited, from our web searches, to our personal communications, location, and our shopping habits…
Content type: State of Privacy
Table of contents
Introduction
Right to Privacy
Communication Surveillance
Data Protection
Identification Schemes
Policies and Sectoral Initiatives
Introduction
Acknowledgment
The State of Privacy in Lebanon is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Privacy International and SMEX.
Key privacy facts
1. Constitutional privacy protection: The Lebanon constitution does not explicitly mention the right to privacy.
2. Data protection law: The Electronic Transactions and…
Content type: State of Privacy
Table of contents
Introduction
Right to Privacy
Communication Surveillance
Data Protection
Identification Schemes
Policies and Sectoral Initiatives
Introduction
Acknowledgement
The State of Privacy in Colombia is the result of an ongoing collaboration by Privacy International and Fundación Karisma and Dejusticia.
Key Privacy Facts
1. Constitutional privacy protection: The constitution contains an explicit protection of the right to privacy (Article 15 of the 1991 constitution).
2…
Content type: State of Privacy
Table of contents
Introduction
Right to Privacy
Communication Surveillance
Data Protection
Identification Schemes
Policies and Sectoral Initiatives
Introduction
Acknowledgement
The State of Privacy in the Philippines is the result of an ongoing collaboration by Privacy International and Foundation for Media Alternatives.
Key privacy facts
1. Constitutional privacy protection: The constitution contains an explicit protection of the right to privacy (Art. III, section 3).
2.…
Content type: State of Privacy
Table of contents
Introduction
Right to Privacy
Communication Surveillance
Data Protection
Identification Schemes
Policies and Sectoral Initiatives
Introduction
Acknowledgement
The State of Privacy in Mexico is the result of an ongoing collaboration by Privacy International and Red in Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D) in Mexico.
Key Privacy Facts
1. Constitutional privacy protections: The right to privacy is enshrined in article 6 of the Mexican constitution.
2. Data…