News and Analysis

N&A, Long Reads, Press Release

News & Analysis

Communities at risk: How security fails are endangering the LBGTIQ+ community

Earlier this month, Brunei attracted international condemnation for a new law that will make gay sex punishable by death . While this is clearly abhorrent, Brunei is not the only country with explicit anti-gay laws. Homosexuality is criminalised in over 70 countries around the world. And even in

News & Analysis

Communities at risk: How governments are using tech to target migrants

According to the International Organization for Migration, an estimated 258 million people are international migrants – that is, someone who changes their country of usual residence, That’s one in every 30 people on earth. These unprecedented movements levels show no sign of slowing down. It is

Long Read

Your local police force might already be able to hack you

(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).

Long Read

Project Hunter: The UK Programme Exporting its Border Abroad

The UK border authority is using money ring-fenced for aid to train, finance, and provide equipment to foreign border control agencies in a bid to “export the border” to countries around the world. Under the UK Border Force’s “Project Hunter”, the agency works with foreign security authorities to

News & Analysis

Why am I seeing this?! PI asks 7 more companies..

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

Long Read

Surveillance Company Cellebrite Finds a New Exploit: Spying on Asylum Seekers

Cellebrite, a surveillance firm marketing itself as the “global leader in digital intelligence”, is marketing its digital extraction devices at a new target: authorities interrogating people seeking asylum. Israel-based Cellebrite, a subsidiary of Japan’s Sun Corporation, markets forensic tools

News & Analysis

Grindr and US national security: why it is time we start caring for the privacy of all users

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is trying to force the Chinese owner of the gay dating app Grindr to sell the app because of national security concerns. This is the first time the committee has considered the national security implications of a foreign social media

News & Analysis

Civil society achieves change, but risks still remain in Kenya's new biometric ID system

Today, the Kenyan Government is starting their biometric registration exercise known as NIIMS, leading to the issuing of Huduma Namba ID numbers. Along with our colleagues and partners in the human rights community in Kenya, we are very worried about the ramifications of this system for people in

News & Analysis

Are you serious Mr Zuckerberg?

This past weekend, in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg called for new regulations to address harmful content, electoral integrity, privacy and data portability. Nine years since he proclaimed that privacy is no longer a social norm, four years since Facebook noticed broadscale

Long Read

Your local police force could download everything from your phone without your consent

(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).

News & Analysis

Planning and participating in a protest could get you under surveillance: three technologies you should know about

Planning and participating in peaceful protests against governments or non-state actors’ policies and practices requires the capacity of individuals to communicate confidentially without unlawful interference. Surveillance technologies are affecting the right to peaceful assembly in new and often unregulated ways: in this article we focus on three technologies and practices deployed by public authorities in monitoring assemblies that raise particular concerns: IMSI catchers, facial recognition, and Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT).

Long Read

How predictive policing technology can lead to discrimination and profiling

(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).

News & Analysis

Tech giants do not face enough competition, new report says

A panel of competition experts has confirmed that tech giants, like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft, do not face enough competition. We welcome the recommendations contained in the report, and we urge significant caution when it comes to solutions that will provide other companies with access to customers' data troves.

Long Read

How your social media activity is monitored by the police

(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).

News & Analysis

Reclaiming privacy: a feminist manifesto

At Privacy International, we talk about: “the world being on fire.”We say it to talk about the recurring threats to our democracies, the elections of authoritarian leaders, the current political climate… Or the actual climate. More often than not, we use it to talk about the (lack of) security in

News & Analysis

Reclaiming the right to privacy: an opportunity to challenge gender inequality

Image source: Oxfam This piece was co-authored with Ruhiya Seward, Senior Program Officer at IDRC and originally appeared here. What if in trying to make development more equitable we’re creating risks that disproportionately impact people based on their gender? Development programming aims to be