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Content type: Examples
Software on smartphones dictates whether an individual should be quarantined. Chinese citizens in 200 cities, beginning with Hangzhou, are required to install the Alipay Health Code app, developed by Hangzhou's local government with the help of Alipay owner Ant Financial, on their smartphones. After users fill in a form with personal information including name, national ID number, contact information, and details of recent travel, the software generates a QR code in one of three colors. Green…
Content type: Examples
Software on smartphones dictates whether an individual should be quarantined. Chinese citizens in 200 cities, beginning with Hangzhou, are required to install the Alipay Health Code app, developed by Hangzhou's local government with the help of Alipay owner Ant Financial, on their smartphones. After users fill in a form with personal details, the software generates a QR code in one of three colors. Green enables its holder to move about unrestricted. Those with yellow codes may be asked to stay…
Content type: Case Study
In the Xingjiang region of Western China, surveillance is being used to facilitate the government’s persecution of 8.6million Uighur Muslims.
Nurjamal Atawula, a Uighur woman, described how, in early 2016, police began regularly searching her home and calling her husband into the police station, as a result of his WeChat activity.
WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile payment app. As of 2013, it was being used by around 1million Uighurs, but in 2014 WeChat was…
Content type: News & Analysis
This creates a restraint on all people who merely seek to do as people everywhere do: to communicate freely.
This is a particularly worrying development as it builds an unreliable, pervasive, and unnecessary technology on top of an unnecessary and exclusionary SIM card registration policy. Forcing people to register to use communication technology eradicates the potential for anonymity of communications, enables pervasive tracking and communications surveillance.
Building facial recognition…
Content type: Examples
A 19-year-old medical student was raped and drowned in the River Dresiam in October 2016. The police identified the accused by a hair found at the scene of the crime. The data recorded by the health app on his phone helped identify his location and recorded his activities throughout the day. A portion of his activity was recorded as “climbing stairs”, which authorities were able to correlate with the time he would have dragged his victim down the river embankment, and then climbed…
Content type: Key Resources
In the lead up to the 2017 German federal elections, there was much debate about the benefits and dangers of data analytics for political purposes. There were some controversies concerning the use of data and the lack of information provided by political parties also raised concerns.
Content type: Examples
Following Ms. Vestager’s investigation into Amazon and its own sector enquiry into online price comparison services in October 2017, in June 2018 the German Federal Cartel Office (“Bundeskartellamt”) claimed that it “received a lot of complaints” and is said to be “looking at the role and market power of Amazon” with regards to Amazon’s hybrid function. (Nicholas Hirst, MLEX, 27 June 2018, Amazon’s ‘hybrid function’ catches eye of German antitrust enforcers.) Germany is Amazon’s…
Content type: News & Analysis
The first half of 2018 saw two major privacy moments: in March, the Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, followed in May by the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") taking effect. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, as it has become known, grabbed the attention and outrage of the media, the public, parliamentarians and regulators around the world - demonstrating that yes, people do care about violations of their privacy and abuse of power. This scandal has been one of…
Content type: Examples
In the lead up to the 2017 German federal election (Bundestagswahl), all political parties used social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and e-mails as platforms to reach voters.
The far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) reportedly hired a Texas-based company for their campaign. Harris Media is known for their work with Republican, far-right and nationalist candidates in the US and worldwide. In 2017, Privacy International revealed that Harris Media was behind the…
Content type: Examples
In the lead up to the German elections, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) created a mobile app, Connect 17, which was designed to create a feedback loop between party headquarters and door-to-door volunteers (also known as canvassers).
The app drew on data from the federal statistics office and polling agencies. It let canvassers decide routes, record whether anyone was home, and whether a conversation had been successful. It also allowed canvassers to compare their…
Content type: Examples
The Sunday edition of the national newspaper Bild reported that Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) party and the centre-right Free Democrats (FDP) party purchased "more than a billion" pieces of personal data about potential voters from a subsidiary of Deutsche Post, which offered target-mailing concepts to its clients. The Deutsche Post subsidiary, Deutsche Post Direkt, rejected these claims.
Instead, Deutsche Post is reported as insisting that it never…
Content type: Examples
Police in the German state of Hesse are using a bespoke version of Palantir's Gotham software system, specially adapted for the police force. Palantir CEO Alex Karp sits on the board of the German mega publisher Axel Springer.
Publication: WorldCrunch, Jannis Brühl
Date: 20 November 2018
Content type: News & Analysis
This piece originally appeared here.
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
Tech competition is being used to push a dangerous corporate agenda.
High-tech industries have become the new battlefield as the United States and China clash over tariffs and trade deficits. It’s a new truism that the two countries are locked in a race for dominance in artificial intelligence and that data could drive the outcome.
In this purported race for technological high ground, the argument often goes, China…
Content type: Report
Countries with powerful security agencies are spending literally billions to equip, finance and train security and surveillance agencies around the world — including authoritarian regimes. This is resulting in entrenched authoritarianism, further facilitation of abuse against people, and diversion of resources from long-term development programmes.
Privacy International's report 'Teach 'em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance' examines this problem closely, providng examples from US, China…
Content type: Long Read
Privacy International (PI) has today released a new report, 'Teach 'em to Phish: State Sponsors of Surveillance', showing how countries with powerful security agencies are training, equipping, and directly financing foreign surveillance agencies.
Spurred by advances in technology, increased surveillance is both powered by and empowering rising authoritarianism globally, as well as attacks on democracy, rights, and the rule of law.
As well as providing a background to the issue, the report…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International has today released a report that looks at how powerful governments are financing, training and equipping countries — including authoritarian regimes — with surveillance capabilities. The report warns that rather than increasing security, this is entrenching authoritarianism.Countries with powerful security agencies are spending literally billions to equip, finance, and train security and surveillance agencies around the world — including authoritarian regimes. This is…
Content type: Examples
In January 2018 the Cyberspace Administration of China summoned representatives of Ant Financial Services Group, a subsidiary of Alibaba, to rebuke them for automatically enrolling its 520 million users in its credit-scoring system. The main complaint was that people using Ant's Alipay service were not properly notified that enrolling in the credit-scoring system would also grant Ant the right to share their personal financial data, including information about their income, savings, and…
Content type: Examples
In February 2018, police in China began using connected sunglasses equipped with facial recognition to scan crowds looking for suspected criminals. In a test at a busy train station in the city of Zhengzhou, police were able to identify and apprehend seven suspects accused of crimes ranging from hit-and-run to human trafficking. Police also identified 26 people using fake IDs, according to the Communist Party's People's Daily Newspaper. The glasses allow police officers to take a…
Content type: Examples
The Chinese company Tencent has issued a statement denying that it stores or analyses communications sent over WeChat, the country's most popular messaging platform after Geely Automobile chairman Li Shufu claimed there was no data privacy in China at a business forum. Shufu also claimed that Tencent chairman Pony Ma was "definitely looking at our WeChat messages every day". Under the Chinese government's rules, all social media groups are required to store user records. Although relatively…
Content type: Examples
In the remote western city Xinjiang, the Chinese government is using new technology and humans to monitor every aspect of citizens' lives. China, which has gradually increased restrictions in the region over the last ten years in response to unrest and violent attacks, blames the need for these measures on the region's 9 million Uighurs. This Muslim ethnic minority make up nearly half of the region's population, and the government accuses them of forming separatist groups and fuelling…
Content type: Examples
In 2015, Ant Financial, a Chinese company affiliated with Alibaba, began deploying "Sesame Credit scores". Ant, which also runs the popular payment app Alipay, claims that it uses both online and offline purchasing and spending habits to calculate a credit worthiness score for each of its more than 350 million users. Users who meet various thresholds qualify for bonuses such as small loans or waivers on deposits. Almost as soon as the system went live, users of popular social media apps such as…
Content type: Examples
In 2016 researchers in China claimed an experimental algorithm could correctly identify criminals based on images of their faces 89% of the time. The research involved training an algorithm on 90% of a dataset of 1,856 photos of Chinese males between 18 and 55 with no facial hair or markings. Among them were 730 ID pictures of convicted criminals or suspects wanted by the Ministry of Public Security. However, criminology experts warned that the results may merely reflect bias in the criminal…
Content type: Examples
In a 2017 study of patterns of postings on Chinese social media, three Harvard researchers disagreed with the widespread claim that the government's strategy is to post "50c party" posts that argue for the government's side in policy and political debates. Instead, the researchers estimated that the Chinese government fabricates as many as 448 million social media comments a year but found that these avoid controversial issues and arguments with government skeptics. Instead, the researchers…
Content type: Examples
In 2016, the Big Data lab at the Chinese search engine company Baidu published a study of an algorithm it had developed that it claimed could predict crowd formation and suggested it could be used to warn authorities and individuals of public safety threats stemming from unusually large crowds. The study, which was inspired by a New Year's Eve 2014 stampede in Shanghai that killed more than 30 people, correlated aggregated data from Baidu Map route searches with the crowd density at the places…
Content type: Examples
According to the US security firm Statfor the Chinese government has been builsing a system to analyse the massive amounts of data it has been collecting over the past years. The company claims: "The new grid management system aims to help the Chinese government act early to contain social unrest. Under the new program, grid administrators each monitor a number of households (sometimes as many as 200). They then aggregate their reports into one enormous surveillance database, where it is…
Content type: Press release
Below is a joint statement from Privacy International and Bytes for All.
This Friday, 27 September, marks the conclusion of the 24th session of the UN Human Rights Council, a session which has, for the first time, seen issues of internet surveillance in the spotlight. Privacy International and Bytes for All welcome the attention given at the Human Rights Council to this issue. However, we are concerned about developments which took place that threaten privacy rights and freedom of…
Content type: News & Analysis
Private surveillance companies selling some of the most intrusive surveillance systems available today are in the business of purchasing security vulnerabilities of widely-used software, and bundling it together with their own intrusion products to provide their customers unprecedented access to a target’s computer and phone.
It's been known for some time that governments, usually at a pricey sum, purchase such exploits, known as zero- and one-day exploits, from security researchers to…
Content type: Examples
By 2017, facial recognition was developing quickly in China and was beginning to become embedded in payment and other systems. The Chinese startup Face++, valued at roughly $1 billion, supplies facial recognition software to Alipay, a mobile payment app used by more than 120 million people; the dominant Chinese ride-hailing service, Didi; and several other popular apps. The Chinese search engine Baidu is working with the government of popular tourist destination Wuzhen to enable visitors to…
Content type: Case Study
For those concerned by reporting of Facebook’s exploitation of user data to generate sensitive insights into its users, it is worth taking note of WeChat, a Chinese super-app whose success has made it the envy of Western technology giants, including Facebook. WeChat has more than 900 million users. It serves as a portal for nearly every variety of connected activity in China. Approximately 30% of all time Chinese users spend on the mobile internet centers around…
Content type: News & Analysis
This piece originally appeared in the Responsible Data Forum.
Would you mind if, every time you post a comment on Twitter, Facebook or another social media platform, the police logged it? I mean, it’s public — surely it’s fair game?
If you think that’s OK, then maybe it’s also OK for a police officer to follow you when you walk down a busy street. That’s also public, right?
Clearly, definitions of public and private become very problematic when you are communicating with potentially…