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Content type: Examples
In February 2019, the World Food Programme, a United Nations aid agency, announced a five-year, $45 million partnership with the data analytics company Palantir. WFP, the world's largest humanitarian organisation focusing on hunger and food security, hoped that Palantir, better known for partnering with police and surveillance agencies, could help analyse large amounts of data to create new insights from the data WFP collects from the 90 million people in 80 countries to whom it distributes 3…
Content type: Examples
The State is not always the only actor involved in the surveillance of benefits claimants. Often those practices are encouraged, facilitated or conducted by private companies. South Africa for instance mandated MasterCard to help distribute benefits through biometric debit cards.
https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/23941/south-africa-enlists-mastercard-to-distribute-welfare-through-biometric-debit-cards
Publication: FinExtra
Content type: Examples
In Mexico, people registered as beneficiaries of any programmes led by the Ministry of Social Development could obtain a TV set, as part of the transition from analogue to digital TV organised by the Ministry of Communications and Transportation. Yet, the Ministry of Communications and Transportation requested the collection of fingerprints, the scanning of the beneficiary’s voter card and the beneficiary’s address in exchange of the TV set. The company Codigo Empresarial SA de CV was tasked…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International today is proud to announce our new project, Aiding Privacy, which aims to promote the right to privacy and data protection in the development and humanitarian fields. Below is an outline of the issues addressed in our new report released today, Aiding Surveillance.
New technologies hold great potential for the developing world. The problem, however, is that there has been a systematic failure to critically contemplate the potential ill effects of deploying technologies in…
Content type: Report
This report investigates the probable effect of the proposed UK national Identity Card system on people who are marginalised, who suffer social disadvantage or exclusion, and those who are disabled. The work focuses on the biometrics element of the government’s proposals (specifically facial recognition, ngerprinting and iris scanning).
The Report provides a specific assessment of the recently published biometrics trial conducted by the UK Passport Service (UKPS), and compares these…
Content type: Report
The evolution of information technology is likely to result in intimate interdependence between humans and technology. This fusion has been characterized in popular science fiction as chip implantation. It is, however, more likely to take the form of biometric identification using such technologies as fingerprints, hand geometry and retina scanning.
Some applications of biometric identification technology are now cost-effective, reliable, and highly accurate. As a result, biometric systems are…