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Content Type: Report
With this report, we shed light on the due process implications of the blanket and indiscriminate surveillance of protesters, activists, and human rights defenders participating in protests. We demonstrate that information gathered through the surveillance of protests is being used in criminal proceedings against activists, protesters, and human rights defenders. We also also show that when this information is being admitted as evidence in criminal proceedings it undermines the right to fair…
Content Type: Report
Over the past years, data retention regulation imposing generalised and indiscriminate data retention obligations to telecommunication companies and Internet service provides has been introduced in various jurisdictions across the world. As the data retention practices across the world have evolved this new report is an attempt to shed some light on the current state of affairs in data retention regulation across ten key jurisdictions. Privacy International has consulted with human…
Content Type: Long Read
Tucked away in a discrete side street in Hungary’s capital, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training (CEPOL) has since 2006 operated as an official EU agency responsible for developing, implementing, and coordinating training for law enforcement officials from across EU and non-EU countries.
Providing training to some 29,000 officials in 2018 alone, it has seen its budget rocket from €5 million in 2006 to over €9.3 million in 2019, and offers courses in everything from…
Content Type: Report
The majority of people today carry a mobile phone with them wherever they go, which they use to stay connected to the world. Yet an intrusive tool, known as an International Mobile Subscriber Identity catcher, or “IMSI catcher” is a form of surveillance equipment that enables governments and state authorities to conduct indiscriminate surveillance of mobile devices, and by extension, on users.
IMSI catchers can do much more than monitor and intercept mobile communications. Designed to imitate…
Content Type: Report
Back in October 2019, PI started investigating advertisers who uploaded personal data to Facebook for targeted advertising purposes. We decided to take a look at "Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Information", a set of information that Facebook provides to users about advertisers who upload files containing their personal data (including unique identifier such as phone numbers, emails etc...). Looking at the limited and often inaccurate information provided by Facebook through…
Content Type: Long Read
Covid Apps are on their way to a phone near you. Is it another case of tech-solutionism or a key tool in our healthcare response to the pandemic? It’s fair to say that nobody quite knows just yet.
We’ve been tracking these apps since the early days. We’ve been monitoring Apple and Google closely, have been involved in the UK’s app process, our partners in Chile and Peru have been tracking their governments’ apps, and more.
Of course privacy concerns arise. But only a simplistic analysis would…
Content Type: Long Read
‘Let’s build an app for that’ has become the response to so many things. It’s no surprise it’s happening now.
Apps are notorious for their lack of security and privacy safeguards, exploiting people’s data and devices. Now we’re being asked to trust governments with their proposed apps -- of which there are many. These are the very same governments who have been keen to exploit data in the past. For instance, PI currently has four outstanding legal cases arising from the last times governments…
Content Type: Long Read
Six years after NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents providing details about how states' mass surveillance programmes function, two states – the UK and South Africa – publicly admit using bulk interception capabilities.Both governments have been conducting bulk interception of internet traffic by tapping undersea fibre optic cables landing in the UK and South Africa respectively in secret for years.Both admissions came during and as a result of legal proceedings brought by Privacy…
Content Type: Long Read
Last week, an investigation by Bloomberg revealed that thousands of Amazon employees around the world are listening in on Amazon Echo users.
As we have been explaining across media, we believe that by using default settings and vague privacy policies which allow Amazon employees to listen in on the recordings of users’ interactions with their devices, Amazon risks deliberately deceiving its customers.
Amazon has so far been dismissive, arguing that people had the options to opt out from the…
Content Type: Long Read
On 17 October 2016, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal handed down judgment in a case brought by Privacy International against the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary and the three Security and Intelligence Agencies (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ).
The case concerned the Agencies’ acquisition and use of bulk personal datasets (‘BPD’) – datasets that contain personal data about individuals, the majority of whom are unlikely to be of intelligence interest, such as passport databases and finance-related…
Content Type: Long Read
As Privacy International celebrates Friday's victory against Britain’s security services - the first such victory this century - we cannot help but feel the success is bittersweet.
After all, we may have convinced the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that GCHQ was acting unlawfully in accessing NSA databases filled with billions of emails and messages, but with a few technical adjustments the intelligence services have managed to insure themselves against any further challenge, at least in…
Content Type: Long Read
Privacy International in October 2014 made a criminal complaint to the National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency, urging the immediate investigation of the unlawful surveillance of three Bahraini activists living in the UK by Bahraini authorities using the intrusive malware FinFisher supplied by British company Gamma.
Moosa Abd-Ali Ali, Jaafar Al Hasabi and Saeed Al-Shehabi, three pro-democracy Bahraini activists who were granted asylum in the UK, suffered variously…
Content Type: Report
This is a memo prepared by Barry Steinhardt of Friends of Privacy USA for Members of the European Parliament regarding the proposed EU-US Agreement PNR.
The proposed agreement regarding Passenger Name Records (PNR) between the United States and the European Union is riddled with faulty assertions and assumptions about US law and the actual operations of the US government.
These faulty assertions and assumptions go to the heart of the agreement and undercut the claims of protections for…
Content Type: Long Read
On June 22-23 2006 the New York Times ran a story uncovering an international financial surveillance programme run by the Bush Administration. In essence the Bush Administration is getting access to international transfer data and storing this in databases at the Treasury Department and/or CIA for access to investigate terrorist activity.
There are a number of inconsistencies in the accounts so far:
The U.S. claims that this is a narrowly focused programme that is compliant with the law,…
Content Type: Report
Race relations across European states are usually far from ideal. However in law, European countries appear to grant Europeans ideal protections against discrimination. There are mounting tensions with ethnic and minority communities in countless European countries, with particular suspicion and aggression pointed towards the Roma people, Travellers, Northern Africans, Turks, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people of Islamic and other faiths. Increasingly these groups are finding safe havens behind…