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Content type: News & Analysis
Email addresses
Acxiom: [email protected]
Criteo: [email protected]
Equifax: [email protected]
Experian: [email protected]
Oracle: https://oracle.ethicspointvp.com/custom/oracle/dp/en/form_data.asp
Quantcast: [email protected] cc: [email protected]
Tapad: [email protected]
Letter for Acxiom and Oracle
subject line: Right to Erasure Request
I am concerned your company exploits my data.
In accordance with my right[s] under the General Data…
Content type: News & Analysis
Our team wanted to see how data companies that are not used to being in the public spotlight would respond to people exercising their data rights. You have the right under the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") to demand that companies operating in the European Union (either because they are based here or target their products or services to individuals in the EU) delete your data within one month. We wrote to seven companies and requested that they delete our data, and we've made…
Content type: Press release
Today, Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK. Privacy International urges the data protection authorities to investigate these companies and to protect individuals from the mass exploitation of their data.
Our complaints target companies that, despite exploiting the data of millions of…
Content type: Advocacy
Today, Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK.
It’s been more than five months since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. Fundamentally, the GDPR strengthens rights of individuals with regard to the protection of their data, imposes more…
Content type: Advocacy
Today, Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK.
It’s been more than five months since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. Fundamentally, the GDPR strengthens rights of individuals with regard to the protection of their data, imposes more…
Content type: Long Read
It’s 15:10 pm on April 18, 2018. I’m in the Privacy International office, reading a news story on the use of facial recognition in Thailand. On April 20, at 21:10, I clicked on a CNN Money Exclusive on my phone. At 11:45 on May 11, 2018, I read a story on USA Today about Facebook knowing when teen users are feeling insecure.
How do I know all of this? Because I asked an advertising company called Quantcast for all of the data they have about me.
Most people will have never heard of…
Content type: News & Analysis
Around the world, from North America to Europe and Asia, governments are starting to roll out smart meters. While the technology promises increased energy efficiency through greater consumer control over energy consumption, smart meters also raise serious privacy concerns. Smart meters collect energy usage data at high frequencies - typically every five, fifteen or 30 minutes. That level of granularity reveals how much electricity is being used in a home and when, which in turn can paint an…
Content type: Long Read
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
In the midst of continued widespread public outrage at the US government’s brutal ‘zero-tolerance’ policy around immigration – multiple data and analytics companies have quietly avoided answering questions about their role in feeding the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s data backbone. These companies are bidding to work with an agency that has time and time again shown itself to be a brutal and problematic.
Privacy International…
Content type: Long Read
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 journalists to politicians.
The bigger picture is often lost when transparency is posed as the only solution to shadowy state and corporate powers. For one, the term is so broadly understood that it…
Content type: Long Read
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 newly launched magazine ROM. The interview was conducted by ROM publisher Khesrau Behroz and writers Patrick Stegemann and Milosz Paul Rosinski.
Frederike Kaltheuner, you work for Privacy…
Content type: Long Read
Yesterday the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) - which is responsible for ensuring people's personal data is protected - announced it intends to fine Facebook the maximum amount possible for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
This decision highlights of how serious and rampant misuse and exploitation of data is. Facebook is responsible and failed to comply with data protection 101: be upfront and honest about what you are doing with people's data.
Importantly, the ICO's…
Content type: News & Analysis
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 phone’s location over the course of 127 days provides an all-encompassing record of the holder’s whereabouts. As with GPS information, the timestamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s…
Content type: News & Analysis
This piece originally appeared here.
We are much more than our physical selves. We are also digital. Every moment we generate more data. Although sometimes this data is under our control, increasingly it is not. This uncontrolled data—this metadata—is often generated as a result of our interactions, movements, sentiments, and even our inaction. Despite being beyond our control, our metadata is still accessible to many. Hardly a day goes by without a news story or global event involving data: a…
Content type: Long Read
We found the image here.
Open a Russian Matryoshka doll and you will find a smaller doll inside. Ask a large data company such as Acxiom and Oracle where they get their data from, and the answer will be from smaller data companies.
Data companies – a catch all term for data brokers, advertisers, marketers, web trackers, and more – facilitate a hidden data ecosystem that collects, generates and supplies data to wide variety of beneficiaries. The beneficiaries of the ecosystem can include other…
Content type: Long Read
If you operate an internet company in Russia, you aren’t necessarily surprised to one day open the door to someone, grasping in one hand a bundle of wires and in the other a letter from a government agency demanding access to your servers, with a black box wedged under one arm.
Internet companies in Russia are required by law to store the content of users’ communications for six months and the metadata of users’ communications for three years, essentially meaning that what a person does…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, US director of national intelligence James Clapper, backed by National Security Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers, warned Congress that the next phase of escalating online data theft is likely to involve manipulating digital information. Clapper and Rogers viewed this type of attack as more likely than a catastrophic event of digitally triggered damage to physical infrastructure. The pair believed that manipulating and deleting data would compromise data integrity and undermine…
Content type: Examples
Uber has closely studied how dynamic pricing functions and when it's acceptable to users. One discovery is that round numbers signal haste and sloppiness where riders appear to believe that more precise numbers (for example, 2.1 instead of 2) have been carefully worked out by an algorithm. The company's head of head of economic research Keith Chen says that riders will pay up to 9.9 times the normal price if their phone's battery is almost dead, information the Uber app openly collects in order…
Content type: Long Read
We found the image here.
When we browse the internet, go to work, drive down the street, go shopping, interact with institutions, or simply move through the city, data is collected about us.
Advanced profiling technologies answer questions we did not raise. They generate knowledge we did not anticipate, but are eager to apply. As knowledge is power, profiling changes the power relationships between the profilers and the profiled.
In a world where everything we do becomes more and more…
Content type: Long Read
As we said before, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandals are a wake-up call for policy makers. And also a global issue. People around the world are concerned by the exploitation of their data. The current lack of transparency into how companies are using people’s data is unacceptable and needs to be addressed.
There is an entire hidden ecosystem of companies harvesting and sharing personal data. From credit scoring and insurance quotations to targeted political communication, this…
Content type: Long Read
In December 2017, Privacy International published an investigation into the use of data and microtargeting during the 2017 Kenyan elections. Cambridge Analytica was one of the companies that featured as part of our investigation.
Due to the recent reporting on Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, we have seen renewed interest in this issue and our investigation. Recently in March of 2018, Channel 4 News featured a report on micro targeting during the 2017 Kenyan Presidential Elections, and the…
Content type: Long Read
The ongoing Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal is a wake-up call for UK policy-makers who too often encourage and promote digital industries over the protection people’s personal data. The scandal has shown that the public is concerned by companies’ exploitation of their data. The current lack of transparency into how companies are using people’s data is unacceptable and needs to be addressed.
Reform should not be limited to the behaviour of individual companies. Consumers are confronted…
Content type: Long Read
Over the past few days we've all learned details about how Cambridge Analytica was able to amass data on voters through the use of an app that would gather data on approximately 50 million Facebook users, including 30 million psychographic profiles.
This is three stories in one.
Yes, this is another story of data that has been exploited for political advantage, again. Political parties and governments continue to want access to social media intelligence and continue to develop profiles…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by Karisma Foundation
7:03: Catalina leaves her apartment and a security camera follows her down the hall, another one observes her in the elevator while she fixes her hair. As she exits the building, the warden tells her she doesn’t have to fix her hair because she is already pretty as she is. She gets to the parking lot where another two cameras look at her while she gets into her car.
8:00: She is heading to an open data workshop organized by the Colombian government in a…
Content type: Long Read
To mark International Women’s Day 2018, Privacy International and some of our partner organisations - Datos Protegidos, Derechos Digitales, the National Coalition for Human Rights Defenders-Kenya, the Karisma Foundation, and the Foundation for Media Alternatives – are telling the stories of women across the world as told by their data over the next seven days (for us, it’s International Women’s Week!).
Gender inequality has many complex dimensions and data exploitation is yet another.…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by Privacy International
07:06: Camille’s smart pillow sends a signal to her smartphone that it’s time for her to wake up. She checks the quality of sleep on the app – last night was not great. Because the pillow tracks the motion in her bed, the company knows what else she may (or may not) have been up to. But the company doesn’t just track her when she is in bed. By downloading the app, Camille has also authorised access to her location wherever she goes, her camera, her contact…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by the Foundation for Media Alternatives
7:01: Naomi wakes up and gets ready for the day.
7:58: Naomi books an Uber ride to Bonifacio Global City (BGC), where she has a meeting. She pays with her credit card. While Naomi is waiting for her Uber, she googles restaurant options for her dinner meeting in Ortigas.
9:00: While her Uber ride is stuck in traffic on EDSA (a limited access highway circling Manilla), Naomi’s phone automatically connects to the free WiFi offered by the…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by Datos Protegidos
04:16: Carolina can´t sleep. She grabs her mobile from the nightstand next to her bed to check her WhatsApp notifications and read some tweets. She decides to disconnect to and tries to go back to sleep.
07:00: Carolina is woken by her mobile phone alarm. She picks it up and checks her social networks and messages again. To her astonishment, she finds a message in a WhatsApp group from her former college classmate Pablo at 5:25 asking if anyone was still…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by Derechos Digitales
03:00: Maritza wakes up and gets ready. It’s still dark. She has to go stand in a queue outside the nearest grocery store, where after several hours her fingerprint will be scanned to retrieve her personal information from a governmental database. This will tell the cashier not only her address, full name and phone number, but also if she already bought her allotted ration of food that month. If so, she will be sent back empty-handed. There are drones flying…
Content type: News & Analysis
Written by the National Coalition for Human Rights Defenders - Kenya and Privacy International
05:00: Mercy’s alarm goes off. She gets out of the warmth of the bed into the piercing morning chill. She switches on the bedside lamp and reaches for her Bible. She then checks in onto her devotional group on Facebook, as she does every morning. Her Facebook app keeps track of her location, and the time she wakes up.
05:24: She steps into the shower and prepares for her day in the…