News and Analysis

N&A, Long Reads, Press Release

Press release

Press release: New report exposes global reach of powerful governments who equip, finance and train other countries to spy on their populations

Privacy International has today released a report that looks at how powerful governments are financing, training and equipping countries — including authoritarian regimes — with surveillance capabilities. The report warns that rather than increasing security, this is entrenching authoritarianism

News & Analysis

Do not water down the e-Privacy proposal!

Privacy International and other European civil society organisations write to European member states to urge them not to water down the e-Privacy proposal. We need more than ever strong regulation to protect the security and privacy of our digital communications, to protect us from being tracked

Long Read

Privacy at public demonstrations

How would you feel if you were fingerprinted by the police before you were allowed to take part in a peaceful public demonstration? As tens of thousands of people attend massive public demonstrations across the UK today against US President Donald Trump in a ‘Carnival of Resistance’, it’s a question

Long Read

Going beyond transparency

This piece was written by PI voluteer Natalie Chyi. Transparency is necessary to ensure that those in power – including governments and companies – are not able to operate in the dark, away from publicscrutiny. That’s why calls for more transparency are routine by everyone from civil society and

Long Read

It’s about human dignity and autonomy

Privacy and data protection are currently being debated more intensively than ever before. In this interview, Frederike Kaltheuner from the civil rights organisation Privacy International explains why those terms have become so fundamentally important to us. The article was first published in the

Long Read

UK regulator indicts data ecosystem, fines Facebook maximum possible amount, and warns UK political parties against exploiting people's data

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office announces it intends to fine Facebook the maximum amount possible for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

News & Analysis

Lone Voices Leading the Way: How Civil Society in Africa is Successfully Countering Government Narratives on Cyber Security

As the international cyber security debate searches for new direction, little attention is paid to what is going on in Africa. Stepping over the remains of the UN Group of Governmental Experts, and passing by the boardrooms of Microsoft struggling to deliver their Digital Geneva Convention, African

Press release

PI joins 20+ organisations to ask European data protection authorities to investigate whether companies are acting in accordance with GDPR

Photo credit: Forbrukerrådet The Norwegian Consumer Council has today published a report which shows how Facebook and Google appear to push users into sharing personal data, and raises questions around how such practices are GDPR compliant. Off the back of the analysis, Privacy International is

Press release

Privacy International, Liberty, and Open Rights Group joined other organisations across the EU to file complaints over Member States’ non-compliance with mass surveillance rulings

Privacy International, Liberty, and Open Rights Group have joined over 60 NGOs, community groups, and academics across the European Union to file complaints to the European Commission. The complaints call for the EU governments to stop requiring companies to store all communications data. The

News & Analysis

Access to US cell phone location data now requires a warrant

Privacy International welcomes today’s decision by the United States Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States, which finds that the government must generally obtain a warrant when seeking mobile phone location records. In particular, PI applauds the Court’s recognition that “[m]apping a cell

Long Read

Thomson Reuters Selling ICE Access to Data

Updated - Thomson Reuters Selling US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Access to Data

Update 28 June 2018 Last week Privacy International wrote to Thomson Reuters Corporation asking the company to commit to ensuring the vast amounts of data they provide to US immigration agencies isn’t used to identify families for indefinite detention or separation, or for other human rights abuses

Press release

Press release: Privacy International asks Thomson Reuters if it will stop facilitating the US government’s “zero tolerance” policy

Privacy International (PI) has today sent an open letter to the President of Thomson Reuters Corporation asking whether he will commit to ensuring the multinational company’s products or services are not used to enforce cruel, arbitrary, and disproportionate measures, including those currently being

News & Analysis

The NPCC is no Longer Open to Public Scrutiny - the Government Must Fix this Loophole Immediately

In order to uphold the law and keep us safe, the police can seriously interfere with a range of fundamental human rights. And so transparency and public scrutiny of their actions are essential to protect against misconduct and abuse. So why is the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) now permitted

Press release

Privacy International calls on the United States government to uphold its international human rights obligations

Gus Hosein, Executive Director of Privacy International: The US federal government's cruel zero tolerance immigration policy has received widespread and international condemnation. In addition to the policy's clear moral failure it is also in violation of the government's legal obligations under the

News & Analysis

Op-ed - Users have demanded better online privacy and security

This piece originally appeared here. The tech industry is ramping up its attack and promulgation of myths around the ePrivacy regulation, as shown by Julia Apostle’s op-ed “ We survived GDPR, but now another EU privacy law looms” (June 14). Let’s set the record straight. Myth #1: the ePrivacy

News & Analysis

UK Data Protection Act 2018 – 339 pages still falls short on human rights protection

While the worlds’ attention, the world’s humour, including a dedicated playlist of 89 songs on Spotify, were on the coming into force of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on 25th May, the UK’s Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018) that received Royal Assent only two days previously had