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Content type: Advocacy
BackgroundThe Snowden revelations and subsequent litigation have repeatedly identified unlawful state surveillance by UK agencies. In response, the UK Parliament passed the highly controversial Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA), which authorised massive, suspicionless surveillance on a scale never seen before, with insufficient safeguards or independent oversight.Privacy International led legal challenges to this mass surveillance regime both before and after the Act became law. The Act…
Content type: Advocacy
Dejusticia, Fundación Karisma, and Privacy International submitted a joint stakeholder report on Colombia to the 44th session of the Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council.Our submission raised concerns regarding the protection of the rights to freedom of expression and opinion, to privacy, and to personal data protection; the shutdown of civil society spaces; protection of the right to protest; and protection of the rights of the Venezuelan migrant and refugee population.…
Content type: News & Analysis
The notorious Clearview AI first rose to prominence in January 2020, following a New York Times report. Put simply, Clearview AI is a facial recognition company that uses an “automated image scraper”, a tool that searches the web and collects any images that it detects as containing human faces. All these faces are then run through its proprietary facial recognition software, to build a gigantic biometrics database.
What this means is that without your knowledge, your face could be stored…
Content type: Video
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You can find out more about Clearview by listening to our podcast: The end of privacy? The spread of facial recognition
Content type: Advocacy
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has developed draft privacy guidance for police agencies' use of FRT, with a view to ensuring any use of FRT "complies with the law, minimizes privacy risks, and respects privacy rights". The Commissioner is undergoing consultation in relation to this guidance.
Privacy International and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association ("CCLA") welcome the Commissioner's efforts to strengthen the framework around police use of facial recognition, and the…
Content type: Advocacy
This report is presented by TEDIC (Technology and Community Association) and Privacy International (PI). TEDIC is a non-governmental, non-profit organization, based in Asunción, that promotes and defends human rights on the Internet and extends its networking to Latin America. PI is a London based human rights organization that works globally at the intersection of modern technologies and rights.
TEDIC and PI wish to express some concerns about the protection and promotion of the right to…
Content type: Advocacy
Last week, Privacy International joined more than 30 UK charities in a letter addressed to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, following his recent declaration, asking him to lift No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) restrictions.
Since 2012, a ‘NRPF condition’ has been imposed on all migrants granted the legal right to live and work in the UK. They are required to pay taxes, but they are not permitted to access the public safety net funded by those taxes.
This is not a topic we are known…
Content type: Report
SUMMARY
In the UK, local authorities* are looking at people’s social media accounts, such as Facebook, as part of their intelligence gathering and investigation tactics in areas such as council tax payments, children’s services, benefits and monitoring protests and demonstrations.
In some cases, local authorities will go so far as to use such information to make accusations of fraud and withhold urgently needed support from families who are living in extreme poverty.
THE PROBLEM
Since 2011…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International sent a letter to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO) addressing social media monitoring carried out by Local Authorities.
The submission builds on a campaign and research carried out by PI highlighting the growth of social media monitoring across Local Authorities, as well as the general lack of internal oversight for some of these activities. After providing an introduction to the research and the findings, the letter highlights each of PI’s concerns…
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: Advocacy
TEDIC, InternetLab, Derechos Digitales, la Fundación Karisma, Dejusticia, la Asociación por los Derechos Civiles y Privacy International acogen el llamado de la Relatoría Especial sobre Derechos Económicos, Sociales, Culturales y Ambientales (DESCA) de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (CIDH) de enviar información para la elaboración del Informe Anual sobre DESCA del año 2019, que se presentará ante la Organización de los Estados Americanos (OEA) en 2020.
El objeto de este…
Content type: Advocacy
TEDIC, InternetLab, Derechos Digitales, Fundación Karisma, Dejusticia, Asociación por los Derechos Civiles and Privacy International welcome the call made by the Special Rapporteurship on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights (ESCER) of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to inform the preparation of the Annual Report of the ESCER for the year 2019, which will be presented to the Organization of American States (OAS) during 2020.
This submission aims to outline…
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: Advocacy
Privacy International has today sent letters to leading social media platforms to ask what they're doing to protect their users' from dangerous surveillance by government immigration authorities.
The letter comes following the implementation of plans by US authorities to require nearly all visa applicants to hand over identifiers of all social media accounts they have used in the previous five years, or face “serious immigration consequences”.
The move not only represents…
Content type: News & Analysis
Planning and participating in peaceful protests against governments or non-state actors’ policies and practices requires the capacity of individuals to communicate confidentially without unlawful interference. From protests in support of LGBTI rights to protests against specific projects that undermine local communities’ wellbeing, these movements would not have been possible without the ability to exchange ideas and develop plans in private spaces.
Unlawful interference with…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International's submission to the Human Rights Committee on a future General Comment on Article 21 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
In this submission, Privacy International aims to provide the Committee with information on how surveillance technologies are affecting the right to peaceful assembly in new and often unregulated ways.
Based on Privacy International’s research, we provide the following observations:
the relationship between right…
Content type: Advocacy
Social media, which can include a wide range of online platforms and applications, can be revealing and sensitive, making any collection or retention highly invasive. The effect would be unjustified intrusion into the private lives of those affected, undermining their freedom of speech and affecting everyone in their networks, including US citizens.
By normalising the practice internationally, other state authorities may reciprocate by demanding social media handles of US citizens,…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International wishes to raise serious concerns regarding the proposal to expand immigration records to include social media handles, associated identifiable information and search results. Specifically, in relation to the current request for comments Docket Number DHS 2017 0038, we object to the Department for Homeland Security proposal to update record source categories to include “publicly available information obtained from the internet”, “commercial data providers” and from “…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International has today submitted comments to a U.S. government consultation on whether the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should keep the social media details of individuals travelling to the US in so-called “Alien Files” documenting all immigrants.
We’ve urged that they don’t, and that they review and stop all similar social media surveillance by the DHS.
The systematic surveillance of social media is an increasingly dangerous trend …
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International's submission on the right to privacy in Thailand, Human Rights Committee, 119th Session.
In our assessment to the Committee, national legislation governing surveillance is inadequate, unclear as to the powers, scope and capacity of state surveillance activities and thus it falls short of the required human rights standards to safeguard individuals from unlawful interference to the right to privacy.