Educational

Examples, Explainer, Educational Case Study, Course, Guide

03 May 2016
In 2012, London Royal Free, Barnet, and Chase Farm hospitals agreed to provide Google's DeepMind subsidiary with access to an estimated 1.6 million NHS patient records, including full names and medical histories. The company claimed the information, which would remain encrypted so that employees
05 Apr 2016
In April 2016, Google's Nest subsidiary announced it would drop support for Revolv, a rival smart home start-up the company bought in 2014. After that, the company said, the thermostats would cease functioning entirely because they relied on connecting to a central server and had no local-only mode
09 Jun 2016
A new breed of market research companies are pioneering geoanalytics to find complex financial information. That is, they use machine learning algorithms to search for patterns in high-resolution satellite imagery that's refreshed daily and available at the scale of 1 meter per pixel. Much of the
A new examination of documents detailing the US National Security Agency's SKYNET programme shows that SKYNET carries out mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network and then uses a machine learning algorithm to score each of its 55 million users to rate their likelihood of being a
08 Mar 2016
In 2016 the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) ruled that the Personal Data Protection Act prohibits companies from monitoring their employees' health via wearables, even when employees have given their permission. The ruling concluded the AP's investigation into two companies; in one of them
Explainer
Phone networks are divided between two networks: the physical and the mobile. The physical runs on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) that serves your home phone. Mobile networks are dominant in the age of communication and are used to relay mobile communications to the PSTN. The most
Explainer
Video surveillance technologies are deployed in public and private areas for monitoring purposes. Closed-circuit television (CCTV)– a connected network of stationary and mobile video cameras– is increasingly used in public areas, private businesses and public institutions such as schools and
Explainer
What is the Global Surveillance Industry? Today, a global industry consisting of hundreds of companies develops and sells surveillance technology to government agencies around the world. Together, these companies sell a wide range of systems used to identify, track, and monitor individuals and their
Video

A video explainer on how companies and governments are extracting and exploiting our data.

Video

We explore in a short video how privacy is defined and needed today.

Video

Once rare, now governments have expansive capabilities to monitor communications.

Video

An explanatory video on a key legal protection for privacy, and yet poorly understood.

Video

We explain in simple terms what was all the excitement around 'big data'.

Case Study

What happened

As we traveled the world we saw alarming use and spread of surveillance capabilities. From country to country we saw the same policy ideas, and the same kit. The role of industry to the growth of surveillance capability had never been exposed before.

What we did

In 1996 we published