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Content type: News & Analysis
Below is an excerpt of an article that recently appeared in Melbourne, Australia's The Age, written by Carly Nyst, Head of International Advocacy at Privacy International:
"Mass surveillance of a country's citizens by its government can no longer be said to be the preserve of authoritarian and dictatorial states.
The publication last week by The Guardian of classified National Security Agency documents has exposed the extent of surveillance by the US government, throwing into question…
Content type: News & Analysis
UPDATE: The Guardian has just reported that "The UK's electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world's biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America's top spy agency."
This recent news reveals a long-held suspicion that the GCHQ had the very powers they were seeking to place on a statutory footing with the Snooper Charter, a bill that was knocked back for being unnecessary and…
Content type: News & Analysis
The long-awaited release by Microsoft today of data about the number of law enforcement requests received and complied with by the company represents an important step forward in the ongoing challenge of understanding the scale of government access to communications information.
The data, the first set released by Microsoft, reveals that it received 70,665 requests for communications content and data in 2012, pertaining to 122,015 users or accounts. Communciations data was disclosed…
Content type: News & Analysis
Nigel Waters attended the APEC DPS meeting in Jakarta as an invited guest. He has previously either formally represented Privacy International or been a part of the Australian delegation. He continues to bring a critical civil society perspective to bear on the APEC privacy work.
The APEC Cross Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) system has moved one step closer to full operation with the acceptance in January 2013 of Mexico as the second participating economy. The United States was accepted in July…
Content type: News & Analysis
Tuesday’s letter to Google CEO Larry Page, personally signed by 29 European data protection authorities, ordered the corporation (inter alia) to give users greater control over their personal information. The notions of trust and control are emphasised throughout the letter, and Google is urged to "…develop new tools to give users more control over their personal data" and "collect explicit consent for the combination of data for certain purposes". It is good news that the…
Content type: News & Analysis
APEC privacy activity has passed another milestone with the acceptance in July 2012 of the USA as the first economy to formally join the cross border privacy rules (CBPR) system. The CBPR Joint Oversight Panel (JOP), with the Canadian chair of the Data Privacy Subgroup (DPS) standing in for the US member in accordance with the ‘no conflict of interest’ provisions, accepted the US government application, which nominated the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as the privacy enforcement authority…
Content type: News & Analysis
In the PI office, we have daily debates about which platforms to use for our organizational operations. As a privacy charity, we are naturally concerned about the integrity of our own information services and resources, but we frequently receive queries about the best technologies to use from a variety of other organizations, some with very complex threat models.
The sad fact is that we are all poorly served by the range of services currently available. We worry that there is a significant…
Content type: News & Analysis
The recent acquisition of Skype by Microsoft, coupled with a series of infrastructural changes, has resulted in a flurry of responses, concerns and analysis of exactly what kind of assistance Skype can provide to law enforcement agencies. Under this heightened scrutiny, Skype released a statement on their blog on 26th July, purporting to re-affirm their commitment to the privacy of their users.
Privacy International are delighted to read that Skype believes that…
Content type: News & Analysis
What do we know?
Very little. The Communication Capabilities Development Programme (CCDP) is going to be included the Queen's Speech next month and we still haven't had public confirmation of the details. What we do know is that there have been secret briefings to MPs designed to scare them into compliance, and secret briefings to industry that were originally designed to calm their fears (but in fact have only served to increase their outrage).
What was previously proposed?
In 2009 the Home…
Content type: News & Analysis
Last month, within thirty seconds of the BBC publishing a quotation from me on the latest round of the nymwars and Google+, my phone rang. Caller ID indicated that it was someone I know who works at Google. "Had I said something wrong?" was my first thought. I quickly retraced in my mind what it was that I had said to the journalist; I had responded in the article that Google's recent announcement could be seen as positive but really it was a sidestepping of the larger challenge of identity…
Content type: News & Analysis
Independent security researcher Trevor Eckhart revealed yesterday that a recent software update to some HTC smartphones has accidentally given third party applications access to huge amounts of private data, including call logs, geolocation history, SMS data and a whole lot more.
The update surreptitiously installs a suite of applications logging users' interactions with their devices. When a device is first switched on, the user ostensibly has the option not to allow HTC to…
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… Alphabet), Facebook (including WhatsApp and Instagram), Microsoft, Signal messenger, Telegram, and Wickr with …
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… channels through cloud companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. There is no check on what they take. Cloud … channels through cloud companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft. There is no check on what they take. Cloud …
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… to the United States Supreme Court in United States v. Microsoft Corp. This case stems from the U.S. Government’s … obtained under the Stored Communications Act, to compel Microsoft to hand over emails and other private information … account. Much of the data is stored in Ireland and Microsoft refused to hand over that data on grounds that the …