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Content type: Examples
16th July 2018
In 2013, Edward Snowden, working under contract to the US National Security Agency for the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, copied and leaked thousands of classified documents that revealed the inner workings of dozens of previously unknown surveillance programs. One of these was PRISM, launched in 2007, which let NSA use direct access to the systems of numerous giant US technology companies to carry out targeted surveillance of the companies' non-US users and Americans with foreign contacts by…
Content type: News & Analysis
14th August 2018
By Digital Rights Foundation, Pakistan
What is a safe city?
The answer to this question is not uniform; in fact it varies according to who you ask.
In a focus group conducted by Digital Rights Foundation in May of last year, consisting of women rights activists from across Pakistan, the answer meant imagining a city that was not only safe for women, in terms of their physical safety, but also welcoming for women and non-binary individuals in its architecture and facilities. Women expressed…
Content type: News & Analysis
12th June 2018
This piece originally appeared here.
We are much more than our physical selves. We are also digital. Every moment we generate more data. Although sometimes this data is under our control, increasingly it is not. This uncontrolled data—this metadata—is often generated as a result of our interactions, movements, sentiments, and even our inaction. Despite being beyond our control, our metadata is still accessible to many. Hardly a day goes by without a news story or global event involving data: a…
Content type: Advocacy
28th November 2018
In response to the consultation on ‘Gender perspectives on Privacy’ by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy, Privacy International presented a submission with its observations.
Content type: News & Analysis
9th December 2018
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
In September 2018, a month after Argentina lawmakers voted against the legalisation of abortion, we spoke to Eduardo Ferreyra from the Buenos Aires-based Asociacion por los Derechos Civiles about the role of privacy in the abortion debate. Also joining us in this second episode of the Gender and Privacy Series is Ambika Tandon from the Centre for Internet and Society in India to discuss the intersection between privacy and bodily autonomy.
Listen to the…
Content type: Examples
2nd May 2018
A new examination of documents detailing the US National Security Agency's SKYNET programme shows that SKYNET carries out mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network and then uses a machine learning algorithm to score each of its 55 million users to rate their likelihood of being a terrorist. The documents were released as part of the Edward Snowden cache. The data scientist Patrick Ball, director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which produces scientifically…
Content type: Long Read
13th March 2018
To mark International Women’s Day 2018, Privacy International and some of our partner organisations - Datos Protegidos, Derechos Digitales, the National Coalition for Human Rights Defenders-Kenya, the Karisma Foundation, and the Foundation for Media Alternatives – are telling the stories of women across the world as told by their data over the next seven days (for us, it’s International Women’s Week!).
Gender inequality has many complex dimensions and data exploitation is yet another. While…
Content type: Long Read
17th September 2018
Who are you? The Challenges of Identity and Identification
“Identity” is a word that covers an incredible range of contested, deeply personal and highly politicised questions. These range from the political and the sociological, through to the psychological and philosophical. A question such as “who are you?” can elicit a multiplicity of responses, none of which are straightforward, are sometimes highly contextual, and are often deeply contested.
However, there is something of an attempt to…
Content type: Long Read
7th November 2018
It’s 15:10 pm on April 18, 2018. I’m in the Privacy International office, reading a news story on the use of facial recognition in Thailand. On April 20, at 21:10, I clicked on a CNN Money Exclusive on my phone. At 11:45 on May 11, 2018, I read a story on USA Today about Facebook knowing when teen users are feeling insecure.
How do I know all of this? Because I asked an advertising company called Quantcast for all of the data they have about me.
Most people will have never heard of Quantcast…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
Because banks often decline to give loans to those whose "thin" credit histories make it hard to assess the associated risk, in 2015 some financial technology startups began looking at the possibility of instead performing such assessments by using metadata collected by mobile phones or logged from internet activity. The algorithm under development by Brown University economist Daniel Björkegren for the credit-scoring company Enterpreneurial Finance Lab was built by examining the phone records…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th March 2018
Written by the Foundation for Media Alternatives
7:01: Naomi wakes up and gets ready for the day.
7:58: Naomi books an Uber ride to Bonifacio Global City (BGC), where she has a meeting. She pays with her credit card. While Naomi is waiting for her Uber, she googles restaurant options for her dinner meeting in Ortigas.
9:00: While her Uber ride is stuck in traffic on EDSA (a limited access highway circling Manilla), Naomi’s phone automatically connects to the free WiFi offered by the…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th March 2018
Written by the National Coalition for Human Rights Defenders - Kenya and Privacy International
05:00: Mercy’s alarm goes off. She gets out of the warmth of the bed into the piercing morning chill. She switches on the bedside lamp and reaches for her Bible. She then checks in onto her devotional group on Facebook, as she does every morning. Her Facebook app keeps track of her location, and the time she wakes up.
05:24: She steps into the shower and prepares for her day in the office as she…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th March 2018
Written by Derechos Digitales
03:00: Maritza wakes up and gets ready. It’s still dark. She has to go stand in a queue outside the nearest grocery store, where after several hours her fingerprint will be scanned to retrieve her personal information from a governmental database. This will tell the cashier not only her address, full name and phone number, but also if she already bought her allotted ration of food that month. If so, she will be sent back empty-handed. There are drones flying over…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th March 2018
Written by Privacy International
08:27: Jen gets on the London Underground to go to work. She uses her contactless debit card to pay for the tube, so Transport for London knows where she is travelling to and from and her bank knows when she takes the tube.
08:36: The public WiFi on the tube means that even when Jen doesn’t connect to it, her every step inside the underground is tracked. The data will eventually be sold to advertisers.
08:58: Jen arrives at work. As with all the lower rank…
Content type: News & Analysis
13th March 2018
Written by Karisma Foundation
7:03: Catalina leaves her apartment and a security camera follows her down the hall, another one observes her in the elevator while she fixes her hair. As she exits the building, the warden tells her she doesn’t have to fix her hair because she is already pretty as she is. She gets to the parking lot where another two cameras look at her while she gets into her car.
8:00: She is heading to an open data workshop organized by the Colombian government in a hotel in…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th March 2018
Written by Datos Protegidos
04:16: Carolina can´t sleep. She grabs her mobile from the nightstand next to her bed to check her WhatsApp notifications and read some tweets. She decides to disconnect to and tries to go back to sleep.
07:00: Carolina is woken by her mobile phone alarm. She picks it up and checks her social networks and messages again. To her astonishment, she finds a message in a WhatsApp group from her former college classmate Pablo at 5:25 asking if anyone was still partying…
Content type: News & Analysis
12th March 2018
Written by Privacy International
07:06: Camille’s smart pillow sends a signal to her smartphone that it’s time for her to wake up. She checks the quality of sleep on the app – last night was not great. Because the pillow tracks the motion in her bed, the company knows what else she may (or may not) have been up to. But the company doesn’t just track her when she is in bed. By downloading the app, Camille has also authorised access to her location wherever she goes, her camera, her contact…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th December 2018
Why is a privacy organisation working with the humanitarian sector, and why does it matter? We may seem like strange bedfellows, but today's ever-growing digital world means that, more and more, people who receive humanitarian assistance are being exposed to unexpected threats.
According to the 2018 Global Humanitarian Overview, there are more than 134 million people across the world in need humanitarian assistance. Of these, about 90.1 million will receive aid of some form. It is likely that…