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Content Type: News & Analysis
No doubt this is turning out to be a summer full of news about internet companies' digital dominance.
In June, Google notified the European Commission of its plan to acquire Fitbit - a plan that we immediately identified would raise grave concerns for our well-being as consumers.
Today the European Commission has made its decision. And it's good news.
The European regulator has decided to undertake a detailed 'Phase 2' investigation, rather than just green light Google's plans, voicing also the…
Content Type: Advocacy
Introduction
In February 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commenced an investigation into the proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google, which was originally announced in November 2019.
In March 2020, we made a submission to the ACCC, arguing that the acquisition would very likely have onerous implications for both consumers and markets. We asked the Australian regulator to apply strict scrutiny and not let hisory once again repeat itself. We concluded that the…
Content Type: Examples
The work and pensions committee has said that the immigration rules that have left 1 million migrant workers in the UK at risk of destitution because they cannot claim universal credit should be suspended. The “no recourse to public funds rule” has left many foreign nationals facing a choice of stay at home in poverty or risking catching or spreading the virus at work. The exclusionary and opaque rules surrounding universal credit left many people, particularly self-employed workers, without…
Content Type: Long Read
Over the last two decades we have seen an array of digital technologies being deployed in the context of border controls and immigration enforcement, with surveillance practices and data-driven immigration policies routinely leading to discriminatory treatment of people and undermining peoples’ dignity.And yet this is happening with little public scrutiny, often in a regulatory or legal void and without understanding and consideration to the impact on migrant communities at the border and…
Content Type: Examples
The Finnish government will not move forward with its plan to oblige unsuccessful asylum seekers to wear ankle monitors, Maria Ohisalo, the Minister of the Interior, stated on Tuesday. “It’s something that’d be difficult to carry out as it’s considered in the government programme,” she said. “The conclusion drawn from the assessment is that it wouldn’t be cost-effective.”
The government programme states that a process will be initiated to amend the aliens act to lay down provisions on “…
Content Type: Examples
Greece has extended a coronavirus lockdown on its migrant camps for the fifth time. The move has prompted accusations that the government is using the pandemic to limit the migrants' movement.
The Greek Migration Ministry announced on Saturday that the country's migrant camps would remain under lockdown until at least July 19. The restrictions began over 100 days ago, on March 21.
"By a joint decision of the Ministers of Civil Protection, Health and Immigration and Asylum, the measures to…
Content Type: Long Read
Monday, 16 June 2025
It’s 7:33 am. Lila’s GoogBit watch vibrates. “You got 6 hours and 57 minutes of sleep last night, including 2 hours and 12 minutes of deep sleep”, the watch reads. “In total, you tossed and turned for 15 minutes only”. Taking into account Lila’s online browsing activity, her sleep pattern, the recent disruptions in some of her other biorhythms, as well as her daily schedule, GoogBit watch has calculated the very best minute to wake her up.
Content Type: Call to Action
Google wants to know everything about you.
It already holds a massive trove of data about you, but by announcing its plans to acquire the health and fitness tracker company Fitbit, it now clearly wants to get its hands on your health too. We don’t think any company should be allowed to accumulate this much intimate information about you. This is why we’re trying to stop its merger with Fitbit.
Google and Fitbit need the European Commission’s approval before they can merge. The merger would…
Content Type: Advocacy
Privacy International (PI), Fundaciòn Datos Protegidos, Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D) and Statewatch responded to the call for submission of the UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, xenophobia and related intolerance on how digital technologies deployed in the context of border enforcement and administration reproduce, reinforce, and compound racial discrimination.
This submission provides information on specific digital technologies in service of border…
Content Type: Long Read
There are few places in the world where an individual is as vulnerable as at the border of a foreign country.As migration continues to be high on the social and political agenda, Western countries are increasingly adopting an approach that criminalises people at the border. Asylum seekers are often targeted with intrusive surveillance technologies and afforded only limited rights (including in relation to data protection), often having the effect of being treated as “guilty until proven…
Content Type: Press release
On 15 June 2020, Google formally notified the European Commission of its proposed acquisition of Fitbit, enabling them to capture a massive trove of sensitive health data that will expand and entrench its digital dominance. Privacy International is calling on EU regulators to block the merger.
In November 2019, Google announced its plan to acquire Fitbit, a company that produces and sells health tracking technologies and wearables - including smartwatches, health trackers and smart scales -…
Content Type: Explainer
Social media platforms are a vast trove of information about individuals, including their personal preferences, political and religious views, physical and mental health and the identity of their friends and families.
Social media monitoring, or social media intelligence (also defined as SOCMINT), refers to the techniques and technologies that allow the monitoring and gathering of information on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter which provides valuable intelligence to others…
Content Type: News & Analysis
This week, we read that a former Apple contractor who blew the whistle on the company’s programme to listen to users’ Siri recordings has decided to go public, in protest at the lack of action taken as a result of the July 2019 disclosures. The news adds to a series of revelations that have been reported over the past months.
While the issue raises serious questions regarding the compatibility of such practices with data protection laws, at the same time, it highlights a wider problem that…
Content Type: Long Read
Today, migrant communities in the UK already face multiple well-documented obstacles in accessing healthcare, not least because of charges to access the National Health Service (NHS), as it is the case for non-EU migrants, and legitimate fears of data-sharing between the NHS and the Home Office.
In the current pandemic, in addition to these concerns, asylum-seekers face an impossible choice: risk exposure to coronavirus, or be unable to apply for asylum.
Individuals seeking…
Content Type: Long Read
Photo by Cade Roberts on Unsplash
For those of you who don't spend the most productive part of your day scanning the news for developments about data and competition, here's what has been going on in the UK since summer 2019.
Basically, the UK competition authority started an investigation into online platforms and digital advertising last summer, and issued their preliminary findings in December 2019, concluding that Facebook and Google are very powerful in the search engine and social media…
Content Type: Advocacy
For a long but fun analysis of the current competition and data state of play in the UK, click here.
Background
PI broadly welcomes the CMA’s interim findings, many of which correspond with issues of longstanding concern to PI and with the points raised in our response to the CMA’s Statement of Scope.
This includes the indication that Google and Facebook have a dominant or strategic position in major elements of the digital advertising market which can -at least, partially- be attributed to the…
Content Type: Advocacy
Background
In February 2020, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) commenced an investigation into the proposed acquisition of Fitbit by Google, which was originally announced in November 2019.
Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, in 2018, generated 85% of its $136.22 billion in revenue from delivering targeted advertisements, has a past of competition law infringements in the European Union. Fitbit is a company that produces and sells health tracking technologies and…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Amid calls from international organisations and civil society urging for measures to protect the migrant populations in Greece and elsewhere, last week, the European Commission submitted a draft proposal to amend the general budget 2020 in order to, among other measures, provide assistance to Greece in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Both at the Turkish-Greek border and in the camps on the Greek islands, there are severe concerns not only about the dire situation in which these people…
Content Type: Case Study
There are 29.4 million refugees and asylum seekers across the globe today. These are people who have fled their countries due to conflict, violence or persecution seeking protection in safer environments.
People have protected those in need fleeing from dire situations since antiquity. However, over recent years, European countries have become increasingly hostile towards refugees - treating them as criminals instead of people in need.
In 2017, German authorities passed a…
Content Type: Long Read
Commercial interests seem to often overshadow the EU’s stance as a global privacy leader. After looking at Europes's shady funds to border forces in the Sahel area, Niger's new biometric voting system, and attempts to dismantle smugglers networks powered by Europe's gifts of surveillance, freelance journalist Giacomo Zandonini looks at the battle for data protection and digital rights in the continent.
What do a teenage labourer on a marijuana farm in Lesotho, a…
Content Type: Key Resources
From Google's acquisition of the Usenet archive in 2001 to walkouts in 2018 over Google's lack of respect for people's privacy in attempting to transform part of Toronto in to a so-called 'smart' city - Google has a long history of abusing people's privacy. This is a timeline of all of those abuses.
Content Type: News & Analysis
On 24 October 2019, the Swedish government submitted a new draft proposal to give its law enforcement broad hacking powers. On 18 November 2019, the Legal Council (“Lagråd”), an advisory body assessing the constitutionality of laws, approved the draft proposal.
Privacy International believes that even where governments conduct hacking in connection with legitimate activities, such as gathering evidence in a criminal investigation, they may struggle to demonstrate that hacking as…
Content Type: Advocacy
As any data protection lawyer and privacy activist will attest, there’s nothing like a well-designed and enforced data protection law to keep the totalitarian tendencies of modern Big Brother in check.
While the EU’s data protection rules aren’t perfect, they at least provide some limits over how far EU bodies, governments and corporations can go when they decide to spy on people.
This is something the bloc’s border control agency, Frontex, learned recently after coming up with a plan to…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Yesterday, we found out that Google has been reported to collect health data records as part of a project it has named “Project Nightingale”. In a partnership with Ascension, Google has purportedly been amassing data for about a year on patients in 21 US states in the form of lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, which amount to a complete health history, including patient names and dates of birth.
This comes just days after the news of Google'…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Even if we are not Fitbit users, we all need to stop and think about the implications of this merger. There is a reason that our health data is subject to higher levels of protection - its intimate, reveals vast amounts about our everyday lives, and the potential consequences if exploited can be devastating. Google should be keeping its hands off our health data.
Sign our letter to the European Commission, asking them to block the Google/Fitbit merger.
Let's tell Google, 'NOT ON OUR WATCH!'
Content Type: News & Analysis
Photo: The European Union
“Border Externalisation”, the transfer of border controls to foreign countries, has in the last few years become the main instrument through which the European Union seeks to stop migratory flows to Europe. Similar to the strategy being implemented under Trump’s administration, it relies on utilising modern technology, training, and equipping authorities in third countries to export the border far beyond its shores.
It is enabled by the adoption…
Content Type: Examples
In February 2019, the UK Home Office told the Independent Chief of Borders and Immigration that it was planning to build a system that could check and confirm an individual's immigration status in real time to outside organisation such as employers, landlords, and health and benefits services. Lawyers and human rights campaigners expressed concerns that the project had received no scrutiny or public discussion, and that the Home Office's record suggested the result would be to unfairly lock…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, the UK Department of Education began collecting data for the schools census, a collection of children's data recorded in the national pupil database and including details such as age, address, and academic achievements. The DfE had collected data on 6 million English children when, in June 2018, opposition led the department to halt the project, which critics said was an attempt to turn schools into internal border checkpoints. In January 2019, however, in an answer to a Parliamentary…
Content Type: Examples
The US Department of Homeland Security awarded a $113 million contract to General Dynamics to carry out the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative (VLVI), a renamed version of the Extreme Vetting Initiative and part of a larger effort called the National Vetting Enterprise. In May 2018, public outrage led the DHS to back away from a machine learning system that would monitor immigrants continuously; however, the reason it gave was that the technology to automate vetting did not yet exist. These…