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Content type: Examples
Google has settled a case brought in 2020 by the parents of an Illinois girl who sued the company in state court alleging that it had violated two sections of the Biometric Information Privacy Act. The case also alleged that Google had violated the law by failing to obtain parental consent to collect, store, and use biometric data belonging to millions of children and had illegally harvest other data such as physical location, website histories, personal contact lists, passwords, and…
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Foodinho, the Italian food delivery subsidiary of the Spanish company Glovo, continues to accumulate millions of euros in fines for infringements of labour law such as collecting and misusing riders' data. New research studying Glovo's app indicates that the company appears to have created its own hidden scoring system so evaluate couriers' performance, and shares personally identified riders' after-hours location with Google and other unauthorised third-party trackers.https://algorithmwatch.…
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Companies like the Australian data services company Appen are part of a vast, hidden industry of low-paid workers in some of the globe's cheapest labour markets who label images, video, and text to provide the datasets used to train the algorithms that power new bots. Appen, which has 1 million contributors, includes among its clients Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. According to Grand View Research, the global data collection and labelling market was valued at $2.22 billion in 2022 and is…
Content type: Examples
Fairplay and the Center for Digital Democracy are asking the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Google and YouTube are violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and the terms of a 2019 settlement agreement by serving children personalised ads on videos labelled "made for kids". The two organisations, along with EPIC and Common Sense Media, believe the FTC should seek penalties topping tens of billions of dollars. In the 2019 settlement Google and YouTube were…
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Chromebooks, which many schools purchased at the beginning of the pandemic because of their lower cost compared to PCs and Macs, are proving expensive as their prices rise, the cost of repairs bites, and Google's expiration policy means many models are about to become e-waste. A study from US PIRG finds that doubling the Chromebooks' lifespan could save public schools $1.8 billion. Older Macs and PCs, by contrast, can go on being used and have resale value. Article: Chromebooks expire to…
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Google is working to extend the lifespan of Chromebooks by providing software updates for up to a decade. The new policy, which will begin in 2024, will ensure that no current Chromebook expires in the next two years. The expiration dates were proving expensive for schools, which were having to spend millions of dollars on replacements because unsupported Chromebooks can't be used for mandatory state testing. Article: Google extends life of ChromebooksPublication: Wall Street JournalWriter…
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UK government ministers are seeking to ensure schools benefit financially from any future use of pupils’ data by large language models such as those behind ChatGPT and Google Bard. Data from the national pupil database is already available to third-party organisations. The BCS head of education recommends that the Department of Education should write a clear public benefits statement to ensure that initiatives benefit pupils as well as providing financial benefits.https://schoolsweek.co.uk/…
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Human raters have played a significant role in the rapid improvement in the machine learning models that fuel modern AI. The raters evaluate the algorithmic output of search engines and AI chatbots and provide "Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback" (RLHF) – the technical name for the deployment of such ratings to improve AI models. The efforts of these workers, who are mostly located in the global South but include thousands in the US, is downplayed by the technology companies to whom…
Content type: Examples
Delivery drivers in Jakarta use GPS-spoofing apps in order to improve their chances of selection by the Gojek delivery and transport app, an equivalent to Apple Pay, Postmates, Venmo, and Uber all in one. Gojek that operates in more than 200 cities in Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand. Other grey market apps enlarge details of orders that are too small to read, automate bidding, and apply filters to open orders. Some apps are distributed via Google Play; more are sold via driver…
Content type: Examples
Four people in Kenya have filed a petition calling on the government to investigate conditions for contractors reviewing the content used to train large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. They allege that these are exploitative and have left some former contractors traumatized. The petition relates to a contract between OpenAI and data annotation services company Sama. Content moderation is necessary because LLM algorithms must be trained to recognise prompts that would generate harmful…
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Hong Kong authorities seeking to ensure the complete removal of the popular pro-democracy protest song "Glory to Hong Kong" from search results got an injunction against Google after the technology giant refused to remove it without a court order. The authorities say in the writ that they are seeking to stop anyone with seditious intent from publishing or distributing the song in any media. After a hearing, the court denied the authorities' request.
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics…
Content type: Examples
In a report, the UK's Digital Futures Commission warns that the explosion of use of education technology brings risks to children's privacy, especially that the data it collects, much of it personally identifiable, will be entered into the heavily commercial global data ecosystem, with uncertain consequences for the future. Although schools have returned to in-person learning, tools such as Google Classroom and Class Dojo have become permanently entrenched even though they have "opaque" privacy…
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The French minister of national education and youth has advised schools not to use the free versions of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace because French public procurement contracts require payment. Paid versions may be allowed if they do not violate data protection rules, including a 2020 French ruling that cloud services that store data in the US are not compliant with GDPR.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/france_no_windows_google/
Writer: Thomas Claburn
Publication: The…
Content type: Examples
A security flaw in the mandatory "Diksha" app operated by the Education Ministry, which became an important tool for giving students access to coursework while at home during the pandemic, exposed the data of millions of Indian students and teachers for more than a year when a cloud server hosted on Microsoft Azure was left unprotected. In 2022, Human Rights Watch found that Diksha was able to track students location, and shared data with Google, which indexed more than 100 files from the…
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As a result of the challenges emerging from Covid-19 to disburse financial assistance, the government of Paraguay decided to change its food security programme, Ñangareko, from an in-kind benefit to a bank transfer consisting of a one-off payment of PYG 500,000 (= +/-73USD).
The Ñangareko Programme is aimed at those affected by Covid-19 which are stated to include the most vulnerable, informal workers, persons without a RUC (the unique taxpayer registry number) or social security, and who don’…
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The global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks finds that Cuba has restricted access to social media and messaging platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as some Telegram servers, on the govt-owned telecom provider ETECSA during the largest protests the country has seen in decades. Access to the streaming services YouTube and Google Video was also limited. The protests focused on rising prices, curbs on civil liberties, and the government’s handling of the pandemic.…
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The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has filed a lawsuit in Hamburg against three AdTech industry trade bodies including the Interactive Avertising Bureau (IAB). Members of the IAB include big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter...), data brokers (Equifax, Experian, Acxiom...) and advertising agencies (Groupm, Publicis, IPG...).
The lawsuit follows the filing in 2018 of complaints with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) and UK Information Commissioner (ICO), which…
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When Dallas police posted on Twitter asking for videos of the protests taking place after George Floyd's killing, a flood of videos and images of K-pop stars were uploaded to its anonymous iWatch Dallas tip-off app. Law enforcement can call on vast numbers of networked cameras - from cars, food and retail chains that are typically willing to share with police, law enforcement agencies' own networks of surveillance and body cameras as well as object and face recognition software, protesters and…
Content type: Examples
Civil society organisations Civil Liberties union for Europe, Open Rights Group and Panoptykon Foundation have filed complaints against Google and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) member companies in Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Romania.
The complaints address privacy abuses arising from real-time bidding processing, and call on data protection authorities to work together in investigation the real-time bidding industry.
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French data protection regulator CNIL fined Google and Amazon €100 million and €35 million respectively for breaches of the French Data Protection Act. The CNIL found that the French websites of Google and Amazon had not sought the prior consent of visitors before advertising cookies were saved on computers, and failed to provide clear information to users as to how they intended to make use of online trackers and how to refuse any use of cookies.
In relation to Google, the CNIL made an…
Content type: Examples
A study describes the data transmitted to backend servers by the Google/Apple based contact tracing (GAEN) apps in use in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark and finds that the health authority client apps are generally well-behaved from a privacy point of view, although the Irish, Polish, Danish, and Latvian apps could be improved in this respect. However, the study also finds that the Google Play Services component of the apps contacts Google servers as often as every 20 minutes…
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When Google and Apple announced their joint platform for contact tracing, the companies said the system would not track users’ locations. By mid-July, the resulting apps had been downloaded more than 20 million times in companies such as Germany and Switzerland. However, in order for Bluetooth, which the app requires, to work on Android phones, users must enable location services, with the result that Google may be able to track their location. Governments and health officials in Germany,…
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Several of the Chinese companies producing personal protective equipment such as face masks were shown via undercover video footage to be using Uighur labour under a government labour transfer programme that pays regional subsidies for each worker taken in. The equipment is being shipped all over the world, including to the US and Latin America. In the course of the pandemic, the number of companies producing PPE in Xinjiang has risen from four to 51. At Medwell, one such company, Uighurs are…
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The French data protection authority, CNIL, has examined the French contact tracing app and ruled that it is not fully compliant with the provisions of GDPR and the French data protection law. CNIL’s primary complaint was that the app transferred the news that a user had been infected to all their contacts, not just those who had been in recent proximity, and the privacy policy was insufficiently specific about the categories of data that were being processed and its recipients. Finally, the…
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Hours before OpenDemocracy filed suit to compel the UK government to release all the contracts governing its deals with a list of technology firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and Faculty, the UK government released the contracts. Faculty is being paid more than £1 million to provide AI services for the NHS, and the companies involved in the NHS data store project, including Faculty and Palantir, were originally granted intellectual property rights and were allowed to train…
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Many of the steps suggested in a draft programme for China-style mass surveillance in the US are being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the pandemic, perhaps due to the overlap of membership between the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the body that drafted the programme, and the advisory task forces charged with guiding the government’s plans to reopen the economy. The draft, obtained by EPIC in a FOIA request, is aimed at ensuring that…
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The UK government spent two months touting its contact tracing app as the prospective basis for returning to something close to normality. As the June 1 target date approached, however, the government increasingly downplayed its importance. In the meantime, Apple and Google’s API were adopted by several others countries that had intended, like the UK, to build their own, and a trial on the Isle of Wight failed to produce the download numbers or success rate the commissioning agency, NHSx, had…
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US state and local authorities are using data from a host of location tracking companies, some of them little-known, such as X-Mode Social, Foursquare Labs, Cuebiq, Unacast, Phunware, and SafeGraph, to help them decide how and when to reopen. Many of these companies are part of the adtech industry and collect location data from unrelated apps to which users have given permission to access their location. Apple’s and Google’s refusal to allow contact tracing apps using their system to access…
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Italy has launched Immuni, one of the first contact tracing apps based on the Apple-Google API. The app is opt-in, and includes an explanation of the privacy and security measures in its setup. The app collects anonymously bluetooth tokens that are automatically randomised, but does not collect GPS or location data and performs all processing on the device.
Source: https://9to5mac.com/2020/06/01/italy-apple-exposure-notification-api-app/
Writer: Michael Potuck
Publication: 9 to 5 Mac
Content type: Examples
France, like the UK, opted to develop its own contact tracing app. "StopCovid", using a centralised design developed by the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proxity Tracing (PEPP-PT) group, which created a framework called ROBust and the privacy-presERving proximity Tracing protocol (ROBERT). French ministers have defended the decision to choose ROBERT rather than the decentralised options, DP3T or Apple's and Google's jointly developed API, saying that the app is not intended to monitor…