News and Analysis

N&A, Long Reads, Press Release

News & Analysis
This guest piece was written by Leandro Ucciferri of the Association for Civil Rights (Asociación por los Derechos Civiles). It does not necessarily reflect the views or position of Privacy International. We look at our smartphone first thing in the morning to check the weather, and our to-do list
Long Read
This piece was originally published in Lawfare in May 2017. This post is part of a series written by participants of a conference at Georgia Tech in Surveillance, Privacy, and Data Across Borders: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives. Cross-border law enforcement demands have become increasingly important to
News & Analysis
Why would we ever let anyone hack anything, ever? Why are hacking tools that can patently be used for harm considered helpful? Let's try to address this in eight distinct points: 1) Ethical hacking is a counter proof to corporate claims of security. Companies make products and claim they are secure
News & Analysis
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source The financial services industry is eager to gather more and more data about our lives. Apart from mining the data they have historically collected such as credit history, they are looking to use our social media profiles to reach into our friendships and social
News & Analysis
Dear Politicians, With elections coming up and quite a few cringe-worthy comments that have come from many of you and from all sides of the political spectrum, we figured it was time to have a chat about encryption. First, let’s say what you shouldn’t do: call for boycotts of companies because they
Long Read
Disclaimer: This piece was written in April 2017. Since publishing, further information has come out about Cambridge Analytica and the company's involvement in elections. Recently, the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica has been the centre of tons of debate around the use of profiling and micro
News & Analysis
This week the United States Congress voted to strip away one of the country’s few safeguards of the right to privacy by repealing rules which would have limited internet service provider’s ability to use or share customers’ data without customers’ approval. Meanwhile, last week, 6,500 kilometers
News & Analysis
For as long as automobiles have been around, manufacturers have been trying to find ways of putting more technology inside of cars, oftentimes sold as value-added services for their customers, whether that be 8-tracks of the 1960s and 1970s, the enhancement to security of central locking of the
News & Analysis
On a hot day in Nairobi, our researcher is speaking to an officer of Kenya’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). The afternoon is wearing on and the conversation has turned to the presidential elections, taking place in August this year. He has just finished describing the NIS’ highly secret
Long Read
This briefing highlights opportunities for NGOs to raise issues related to the right to privacy before some selected UN human rights bodies that have the mandate and the capacity to monitor and provide recommendations and redress. The briefing provides some examples based on Privacy International’s
Long Read
In this special briefing for International Women’s Day 2017, we explore through the work of the Privacy International Network some areas of concern being addressed in relation to privacy, surveillance, women’s rights, and gender. Coding Rights demonstrates the important of generating and
Press release
Privacy International Executive Director Dr Gus Hosein said: “If today’s leaks are authenticated, they demonstrate what we’ve long been warning about government hacking powers — that they can be extremely intrusive, have enormous security implications, and are not sufficiently regulated
News & Analysis
This guest piece was written by Elonnai Hickok, Amber Sinha and Vanya Rakesh of the Centre for Internet and Society. It does not necessarily reflect the views or position of Privacy International. In 2009, the Government of India set up the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) as an
Long Read
Introduction A growing number of governments around the world are embracing hacking to facilitate their surveillance activities. Yet hacking presents unique and grave threats to our privacy and security. It is far more intrusive than any other surveillance technique, capable of accessing information
Long Read
This piece was orignally published in Slate in February 2017 In 2015, the FBI obtained a warrant to hack the devices of every visitor to a child pornography website. On the basis of this single warrant, the FBI ultimately hacked more than 8,700 computers, resulting in a wave of federal prosecutions
News & Analysis
Technologists hoped the “Crypto Wars” of the 1990s – which ended with cryptographers gaining the right to legally develop strong encryption that governments could not break – was behind them once and for all. Encryption is a fundamental part of our modern life, heavily relied on by everything from