Advanced Search
Content Type: Advocacy
Privacy International welcomed the opportunity to provide input to the study of the UN Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on the human rights implications of new and emerging technologies in the military domain (NTMD) to be presented to the Human Rights Council at its sixtieth session.In the course of our work, we observe that the line between military and civilian technologies is blurring. Governments are increasingly relying on the very same technologies for military and civilian uses.…
Content Type: News & Analysis
In the midst of the atrocious war currently being waged by Russia on Ukraine, on 14 March 2022 Reuters reported that Clearview AI, the infamous online surveillance company, had offered its services to the Ukrainian defense ministry. A day later in an interview for TechCrunch, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister for Digital Transformation confirmed that the partnership with Clearview AI was "currently in very early development".
Clearview is an online surveillance company that collects…
Content Type: Explainer
An array of digital technologies are being deployed in the context of border enforcement. Satellite and aerial surveillance are part of the surveillance toolkit and yet, they are also used by organisations seeking to hold government actions to account and improve efficacy of their own work. To effectively critique state use and delve into potential benefits of satellite and aerial surveillance, we must first understand it.
In this explainer we dig into a technology which many are aware of for…
Content Type: Long Read
Since the September 11th attacks, decision makers across the globe have embraced overreaching surveillance technologies. The global “War on Terror” ushered in and normalized an array of invasive surveillance technologies. Collection and storage of biometrics data and the application of statistical methods to such data have been touted as uniquely suited to twenty-first century threats. Yet, biometrics technologies are not seamless, panoptic technologies that allow for perfect control. They can…
Content Type: Long Read
Privacy International (PI) and 13 other civil society organisations from Europe and Africa are calling for urgent reforms to EU aid and cooperation programmes to ensure they promote privacy protections in non-member countries and do not facilitate the use of surveillance which violates fundamental rights.It comes following the public release of hundreds of documents…
Content Type: Long Read
The European Union (EU) is the world’s largest donor of development aid, an instrumental supporter of democracies and peace around the world, and a powerful global force for reigning-in big tech and other exploitative industries.
But since the 2015 migration crisis and with populist anti-immigration parties in power across the Union, it has focused this immensely powerful influence abroad squarely on managing flows of migration: using its economic, diplomatic, and security might to…
Content Type: Report
One name in tech has become embroiled in controversy: Palantir, a big-data analytics outfit.
Palantir weren’t that well known in the UK until the Covid-19 pandemic, when they were thrust into the national spotlight after the UK Government granted them access to reportedly unprecedented quantities of NHS patient data for processing and analysis in response to the novel Coronavirus.
Palantir isn’t just working with the NHS, yet despite their extensive work with the government could potentially…
Content Type: Report
New technologies continue to present great risks and opportunities for humanitarian action. To ensure that their use does not result in any harm, humanitarian organisations must develop and implement appropriate data protection standards, including robust risk assessments.
However, this requires a good understanding of what these technologies are, what risks are associated with their use, and how we can try to avoid or mitigate them. This joint report by Privacy International and the…
Content Type: Impact Case Study
What happened
Under pressure to be more accountable for their use of resources, but also due to the post-9/11 push to track and identify terrorists across the world, the humanitarian and development sectors began increasingly to look to identity registration, including biometrics, and the collection and sharing of vast amounts of data on their beneficiaries.
Development funding was supporting the deployment of ID systems, and both sectors were enthralled with ‘big data’ initiatives, all…
Content Type: Long Read
Today, Privacy International is publishing the result of a global effort to benchmark surveillance policies and practices in the countries that are part of the Privacy International Network. We’re calling it the ‘State of Surveillance’.
We designed a survey of questions based on some key issues: statistics about the communications infrastructure of the country; what civil society organisations and groups that analyse privacy issues; the international and domestic legal framework regulating…
Content Type: Report
Over a dozen international companies are supplying powerful communications surveillance technology in Colombia. Privacy International examines the actors across the world involved in facilitating state surveillance.
The report is available in English and Spanish.