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Content Type: News & Analysis
What if we told you that every photo of you, your family, and your friends posted on your social media or even your blog could be copied and saved indefinitely in a database with billions of images of other people, by a company you've never heard of? And what if we told you that this mass surveillance database was pitched to law enforcement and private companies across the world?
This is more or less the business model and aspiration of Clearview AI, a company that only received worldwide…
Content Type: Press release
In what could be seen as one of the strongest sanctions against the company in Europe, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which is tasked with enforcing data protection legislation in the UK, has today announced its provisional intent to issue a potential fine of £17 million against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI.
Clearview AI, which only received worldwide attention following a New York Times report back in January 2020, is a company whose business model…
Content Type: Long Read
Introduction
Technology has driven a number of changes in the way that financial services are packaged and accessed by consumers. These changes have led to the rise of fintech, a data intensive industry that has been touted for its convenience and as an alternative to traditional financial services.
The current article looks at the use of digital loan Apps in Philippines and Kenya and contextualises the global discussions on fintech which we have been monitoring for some years. Research…
Content Type: News & Analysis
After almost 20 years of presence of the Allied Forces in Afghanistan, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement in February 2020 on the withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan by May 2021. A few weeks before the final US troops were due to leave Afghanistan, the Taliban had already taken control of various main cities. They took over the capital, Kabul, on 15 August 2021, and on the same day the President of Afghanistan left the country.
As seen before with regime…
Content Type: Long Read
When you buy a brand-new low-cost phone, it’s likely to come pre-installed with insecure apps and an outdated operating system. What this means is that you or your loved ones could be left vulnerable to security risks or to having their data exploited. Privacy shouldn’t be a luxury. That’s why we advocate for companies to provide the latest security features and privacy protections for both low- and high-cost phones.
Content Type: News & Analysis
Today Apple announced a set of measures aimed at improving child safety in the USA. While well-intentioned, their plans risk opening the door to mass surveillance around the world while arguably doing little to improve child safety.
Among the measures, Apple has announced that it is to introduce “on-device machine learning” which would analyse attachments for sexually explicit material, send a warning, and begin scanning every photo stored on its customers’ iCloud in order to detect child…
Content Type: Long Read
For many, browsing the internet or checking social media comes with its fair share of being targeted with ads selling “fad diet” subscription-based programmes, magic weight-loss powders, or promising a secret trick to lose weight quickly. Some of the products and programmes sold have been described as scams, with a very real impact for those suffering from eating disorders and those who fall prey to these ads. This is even more problematic due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has seen the…
Content Type: Long Read
Now more than ever with a global pandemic happening, our lives are being shaped by our interaction with the digital world. Work meetings on Zoom followed by Skype with family before a quick run with your favourite running app and a Google search for your next meal: technologies and services offer us a lot and greatly improve our daily lives. But what's the real cost of these tools we rely on so much?
A lot of these companies, especially those offering free services, collect data about you. It…
Content Type: Long Read
Among the many challenges of 2020, the impact on elections around the world kept us all on the edge of our seats. 75 countries postponed national and local elections due to Covid 19. Of the elections that went ahead, we saw Covid safe measures at polling stations (South Korea led the way forward in April) an increase in postal voting (who can forget the USA, but also Poland) and political parties in Uganda conducting "virtual" campaigns as mass rallies and in person campaign meetings were…
Content Type: Long Read
Political parties depend on data to drive their campaigns, from deciding where to hold rallies, which campaign messages to focus on in which area, and how to target supporters, undecided voters and non-supporters, including with ads on social media. Political parties increasingly hire private companies to do the bulk of this work, and our primary concern is how these companies use personal data to “profile” people and drive election campaigning.
As part of PI’s programme of work on Defending…
Content Type: Advocacy
An interoperability requirement for “gatekeeper” firms would:
give a fair chance for competition on the merits of new services.
contribute to meeting the three key objectives of the Commission’s February 2020 Digital Future Communication: ensuring technology works for people; a fair and competitive economy and an open, democratic and sustainable society.
As the letter notes, "major digital competition reviews over the last two years [...] have recommended interoperability requirements.…
Content Type: Long Read
In 2019, we exposed the practices of five menstruation apps that were sharing your most intimate data with Facebook and other third parties. We were pleased to see that upon the publication of our research some of them decided to change their practices. But we always knew the road to effective openness, transparency, informed consent and data minimisation would be a long one when it comes to apps, which for the most part make profit from our menstrual cycle and even sometimes one’s desire to…
Content Type: News & Analysis
An excerpt of this piece was first published in June 2020 in Adbusters, an international not-for-profit magazine produced by a global collective of artists and activists who want to 'shake up complacent consumer culture'.
Big oil. Big tobacco. Big pharma. How did we let ‘big tech’ happen? You would have thought humanity would learn its lesson. That nothing good comes of the mass accumulation and concentration of power into the hands of so few.
The internet was meant to be different. No…
Content Type: Frequently Asked Questions
On 27 October 2020, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a report into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) - Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes.
After our initial reaction, below we answer some of the main questions regarding this report.
Content Type: News & Analysis
Privacy International (PI) welcomes today's report from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes. As a result, the ICO has ordered the credit reference agency Experian to make fundamental changes to how it handles people's personal data within its offline direct marketing services.
It is a long overdue enforcement action against Experian.…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Privacy International (PI) has today warned UK regulatory and law enforcement bodies about the potential deployment of an extensive and potentially nationwide police facial recognition surveillance system. We are urging them to investigate and take steps to ensure that no ‘backdoor’ for unlawful facial recognition surveillance will be developed under the umbrella of a crime reporting system.
According to pricing and data-sharing templates, UK surveillance company Facewatch is offering to…
Content Type: Explainer
The lead author of this piece is Elettra Bietti, a doctoral student at Harvard Law School and volunteer for Privacy International
Network effects
Social media companies and other digital business models are driven by so-called network effects. A network effect (also called a network externality) is a service’s propensity to improve functionally as the number of people using it and the amount of data collected through it increases. For example, as the number of Facebook users increases, Facebook…
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: News & Analysis
Banning TikTok? It's time to fix the out-of-control data exploitation industry - not a symptom of it
Chinese apps and tech companies have been at the forefront of the news recently. Following India's ban of 59 chinese apps in July, President Trump announced his desire to ban TikTok, shortly followed by his backing of Microsoft's intention to buy the US branch of its parent company ByteDance. Other than others lip syncing his public declaration, what does President Trump fear from this app, run by a firm, based in China?
It's all about that data
One clear answer emerges: the exploitation of…
Content Type: Explainer
Definition
An immunity passport (also known as a 'risk-free certificate' or 'immunity certificate') is a credential given to a person who is assumed to be immune from COVID-19 and so protected against re-infection. This 'passport' would give them rights and privileges that other members of the community do not have such as to work or travel.
For Covid-19 this requires a process through which people are reliably tested for immunity and there is a secure process of issuing a document or other…
Content Type: Examples
UK police were almost seven times more likely to issue fines to black, Asian, and minority ethnic people than white feel for lockdown infractions. The exact figures varied around the UK; in Cumbria, which is mostly white and where people from a BAME background are more likely to be visitors, it was 6.8, while in Lincolnshire and Avon and Somerset it was 4.4 and in West Midlands it was 1.6. The National Police Chiefs’ Council said it had commissioned a detailed statistical analysis of the force-…
Content Type: Examples
Chinese police are using equipment from the US company Thermo-Fisher to collect blood samples from 35 million to 70 million men and boys to build a genetic map of the country's 700 million males to add to its existing database of 80 million genetic profiles. The database would allow the authorities to track down a man's male relatives using only his blood, saliva, or other genetic material. The project, which is meeting opposition from within China, is a substantial escalation of China's…
Content Type: Video
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Useful info
How to minimise targeted ads: privacyinternational.org/act/minimise-targeted-ads
Protect yourself from online tracking: privacyinternational.org/act/protect-yourself-online-tracking
Social media account settings: privacyinternational.org/act/protect-…
Content Type: News & Analysis
In September 2019, PI published the report Your Mental Health for Sale. Our investigation looked into popular mental health websites and their data sharing practices.
Our findings suggest that, at the time of the research, most websites we looked at were using third party tracking for advertising purposes, sometimes relying on programmatic advertising technologies such as Real Time Bidding (RTB), sharing personal data with potentially thousands of actors. Some websites were also found sharing…
Content Type: Explainer
The internet is filled with guides on how to file a Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Depending on the country you are in, it is likely that a local NGO – or your national freedom of information authority. – will have come up with one. The Global Investigative Journalism Network has an excellent list of FOI resources available in many countries across every continent. We really recommend you take a look at it; many of the FOI guides we love are in that repository.At PI we equally spend much…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Name: Google/Fitbit mergerAge: GestatingAppearance: A bit dodgy. One of the world’s biggest tech giants, trying to purchase a company that makes fitness tracking devices, and therefore has huge amounts of our health data.I don’t get it. Basically Google is trying to buy Fitbit. As if Google doesn’t already have enough data about us, it now wants huge amounts of health data too.Oh, Fitbit, that’s that weird little watch-type-thing that people get for Christmas, wear for about a month while they…
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
You might have read our investigation into advertisers who upload your data on Facebook and found out some companies doing the same to you. Well, you can join us and hold them accountable by sending your own Data Subject Access Request (DSAR)!
Before you get started we suggest you read our FAQ and take a look at our 7+1 tips to make the most out of your DSAR before and after.
To do so you simply need to copy the message bellow and send it to the companies that uploaded your data…
Content Type: Explainer
Hello friend,
You may have found your way here because you are thinking about, or have just submitted, a Data Subject Access Request, maybe to your Facebook advertisers like we did. Or maybe you are curious to see if Policing, Inc. has your personal data.
The right to access your personal data (or access right) is just one of a number of data rights that may be found in data protection law, including the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, better known as "GDPR", which took…
Content Type: Long Read
Introduction
In August 2019, when Facebook announced a few new features for advertisers such as ads in search, PI decided to take an in-depth look at what features the company offers its users when it comes to understanding its advertising practices. One of these features, which caught our attention is Facebook Ads Preference, a tool that among other things, lists businesses/advertisers that have uploaded your personal data to target you with (or exclude you from) ads on the platform.