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Content type: Long Read
24th February 2020
This piece was written by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, who are policy officers at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in India. The piece was originally published on the website Economic Policy Weekly India here.
In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices…
Content type: Report
16th June 2020
Back in October 2019, PI started investigating advertisers who uploaded personal data to Facebook for targeted advertising purposes. We decided to take a look at "Advertisers Who Uploaded a Contact List With Your Information", a set of information that Facebook provides to users about advertisers who upload files containing their personal data (including unique identifier such as phone numbers, emails etc...). Looking at the limited and often inaccurate information provided by…
Content type: Long Read
4th December 2020
In 2019, we exposed the practices of five menstruation apps that were sharing your most intimate data with Facebook and other third parties. We were pleased to see that upon the publication of our research some of them decided to change their practices. But we always knew the road to effective openness, transparency, informed consent and data minimisation would be a long one when it comes to apps, which for the most part make profit from our menstrual cycle and even sometimes one’s desire to…
Content type: News & Analysis
26th August 2020
A new report by the UN Working Group on mercenaries analyses the impact of the use of private military and security services in immigration and border management on the rights of migrants, and highlights the responsibilities of private actors in human rights abuses as well as lack of oversight and, ultimately, of accountability of the system.
Governments worldwide have prioritised an approach to immigration that criminalises the act of migration and focuses on security.
Today, borders are not…
Content type: Long Read
7th May 2020
This week saw the release of a coronavirus tracking app within the United Kingdom, initially to be trialled in the Isle of Wight. Privacy International has been following this closely, along with other ‘track and trace’ apps like those seen in over 30 other countries.
The UK’s app is no different. It is a small part of a public health response to this pandemic. As with all the other apps, it is vital that it be integrated with a comprehensive healthcare response, prioritise people, and…
Content type: Examples
19th October 2020
In early August, when the UK government announced it was purchasing 90-minute saliva-based COVID-19 tests called LamPORE and 5,000 lab-free machines to process them, supplied by DNANudge, clinical researchers were dismayed to find that there is no publicly available data about the accuracy or performance of these tests. While the tests could be a game-changer by offering rapid, on-the-spot testing with less discomfort for patients, no scientific research was offered to validate the tests, not…
Content type: News & Analysis
27th October 2020
Privacy International (PI) welcomes today's report from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes. As a result, the ICO has ordered the credit reference agency Experian to make fundamental changes to how it handles people's personal data within its offline direct marketing services.
It is a long overdue enforcement action against Experian.
Read our Q&A on the report here.…
Content type: Long Read
21st September 2020
An edited version of this article was originally published on the EDRi website in September 2020.Introduction
Monopolies, mergers and acquisitions, anti-trust laws. These may seem like tangential or irrelevant issues for privacy and digital rights organisations. But having run our first public petition opposing a big tech merger, we wanted to set out why we think this is an important frontier for people's rights across Europe and indeed across the world.
In June, Google notified the European…
Content type: News & Analysis
22nd January 2020
On New Year's Day, the Twitter account @HindsightFiles began publishing internal communications and documents from the now defunct SCL Group, dating from 2014-2018. They came from the hard drive of Brittany Kaiser, who held several senior positions at SCL Group including at one of its subsidiaries, Cambridge Analytica, and featured in the Netflix documentary "The Great Hack".
Privacy International first investigated Cambridge Analytica in 2017. We questioned the company's role in the Kenyan…
Content type: Advocacy
24th February 2020
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: Examples
9th April 2020
The consumer and market trends insight company StatSocial announced Crisis Insights, which it claims tracks rapidly changing consumer audience dynamics to help US brands and CMOs respond effectively to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic and economic slowdown. StatSocial's Silhouette social data platform monitors and analyses more than 1.3 billion social accounts covering more than 70% of US households. Crisis Insights is intended to identify the changing dynamics of customers and consumers who…
Content type: News & Analysis
24th April 2020
An estimated 90% of the world’s student population are affected by school closures in the Covid-19 pandemic. And, in the absence of physical space, education technology companies are stepping in to fill the gap. There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the potential of technology to provide support, but it’s important to consider the ongoing implications of which technology we choose, and the implications for those families who don’t have access to them in the first place.
That’s why we…
Content type: Examples
20th August 2020
After governments in many parts of the world began mandating wearing masks when out in public, researchers in China and the US published datasets of images of masked faces scraped from social media sites to use as training data for AI facial recognition models. Researchers from the startup Workaround, who published the COVID19 Mask image Dataset to Github in April 2020 claimed the images were not private because they were posted on Instagram and therefore permission from the posters was not…
Content type: Long Read
1st May 2020
Photo by Cade Roberts on Unsplash
For those of you who don't spend the most productive part of your day scanning the news for developments about data and competition, here's what has been going on in the UK since summer 2019.
Basically, the UK competition authority started an investigation into online platforms and digital advertising last summer, and issued their preliminary findings in December 2019, concluding that Facebook and Google are very powerful in the search engine and social media…
Content type: Video
23rd June 2020
Immediately following the UK general election in December 2019, we worked with Open Rights Group to commission a YouGov poll about public understanding and public opinion about the use of data-driven campaigning in elections.
The poll used a representative sample of 1,664 adults across the UK population.
'Data-driven political campaigning' is about using specific data about you to target specific messages at you. So, for this might involve knowing that you are, for example, likely to have…
Content type: Press release
17th June 2020
On 15 June 2020, Google formally notified the European Commission of its proposed acquisition of Fitbit, enabling them to capture a massive trove of sensitive health data that will expand and entrench its digital dominance. Privacy International is calling on EU regulators to block the merger.
In November 2019, Google announced its plan to acquire Fitbit, a company that produces and sells health tracking technologies and wearables - including smartwatches, health trackers and smart scales -…
Content type: Press release
29th April 2020
Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash
Today Privacy International, Big Brother Watch, medConfidential, Foxglove, and Open Rights Group have sent Palantir 10 questions about their work with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) during the Covid-19 public health crisis and have requested for the contract to be disclosed.
On its website Palantir says that the company has a “culture of open and critical discussion around the implications of [their] technology” but the company have so far…
Content type: Advocacy
24th February 2020
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
8th July 2020
Privacy International and Hiperderecho made a joint submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) ahead of the Committee finalising the list of issues for the examination of Peru.
The submission builds on research commissioned by Privacy International and carried out by Hiperderecho on the state of reproductive rights in Peru, and how their exercise intersects with privacy and tech.
The submission is available in both English and…
Content type: News & Analysis
24th June 2020
Name: Google/Fitbit mergerAge: GestatingAppearance: A bit dodgy. One of the world’s biggest tech giants, trying to purchase a company that makes fitness tracking devices, and therefore has huge amounts of our health data.I don’t get it. Basically Google is trying to buy Fitbit. As if Google doesn’t already have enough data about us, it now wants huge amounts of health data too.Oh, Fitbit, that’s that weird little watch-type-thing that people get for Christmas, wear for about a month while they…
Content type: News & Analysis
18th August 2020
Back in January, Privacy International and over 50 other organisations wrote to Google asking the company to take action over pre-installed apps that cannot be deleted (often known as “bloatware”), which can leave users vulnerable to their data being collected, shared and exposed without their knowledge or consent. Thousands of people from over 50 countries signed our petition supporting this ask. We welcome the constructive conversations we had with Google following this campaign and for the…
Content type: Long Read
24th February 2020
In 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook announced the “Download Your Information” feature allowing users to download all the information that the company have on them since the creation of the account. All of it? It doesn’t seem so. Concerns were quickly raised when Facebook released the feature, that the information was inaccurate and incomplete.
Privacy International recently tested the feature to download all ‘Ads and Business’ related information (You can accessed it…
Content type: Video
1st July 2020
The incorporation of new technologies to electoral processes is a phenomenon with a global and exponential growth. Despite its benefits, online campaigning is not without challenges, and can pose threats to transparency and equity in electoral competition. Given the role of elections as foundational pillars of the democratic system and a key gateway for the exercise of fundamental civil rights, these implications must be assessed with care and through specific tools.
We at PI, together…
Content type: Report
6th February 2020
The changes discussed in this article are based on a second analysis performed in late November, 3 months after the original study Your Mental Health is for Sale and following the exact same methodology. All data collected can be found at the bottom of this page.
Change is possible
Back in September 2019 we published the report Your Mental Health is for Sale exposing how a majority of the top websites related to mental health in France, Germany and the UK share data for advertising purposes.…
Content type: News & Analysis
1st July 2020
In September 2019, PI published the report Your Mental Health for Sale. Our investigation looked into popular mental health websites and their data sharing practices.
Our findings suggest that, at the time of the research, most websites we looked at were using third party tracking for advertising purposes, sometimes relying on programmatic advertising technologies such as Real Time Bidding (RTB), sharing personal data with potentially thousands of actors. Some websites were also found sharing…
Content type: News & Analysis
28th September 2020
Abortion without privacy guarantees is not safe abortion.
Safe access to abortion is far from guaranteed throughout the world. And in many countries, there are groups working hard to make sure that safe access to this vital component of reproductive healthcare remains out of reach.
Online platforms are the new arena of anti-reproductive advocacy, and those opposed to reproductive rights are increasingly deploying digital, data-exploitative strategies. By using and developing digital…
Content type: Guide step
5th March 2020
uBlock Origin (not to be confused with uBlock which is a different project) is an independent and open-source ad blocker relying on a curated list of servers. It prevents your browser from connecting to these servers to serve you ads.
Note: There are many ad blockers on the market and you can test alternatives. By using an independent, open-source and free ad blocker, you are more likely to avoid products with conflicts of interest, spywares or blockers with "acceptable ads" programs…
Content type: Guide step
1st May 2020
Google dominates online search. The company also owns YouTube and Android, with the latter reportedly making up nearly 75% of the global smart phone market share. PI has written about the numerous problems that come from corporate concentration and the use of data by monopolistic companies, and there are numerous examples of Google's failure to protect its users.
Below is a set of steps you can take if you wish to minimise ad targeting when using Google.
1. Go to gmail.com and sign in
Content type: News & Analysis
6th August 2020
No doubt this is turning out to be a summer full of news about internet companies' digital dominance.
In June, Google notified the European Commission of its plan to acquire Fitbit - a plan that we immediately identified would raise grave concerns for our well-being as consumers.
Today the European Commission has made its decision. And it's good news.
The European regulator has decided to undertake a detailed 'Phase 2' investigation, rather than just green light Google's plans, voicing also the…
Content type: News & Analysis
22nd May 2020
GDPR was hard won. PI, together with other civil society actors, fought from the beginning for a version of the law that offers the strongest rights and protections in the face of intense industry lobbying.
Holding the hidden data ecosystem to account
Two years ago, we committed to using GDPR to seek to hold to account the hidden data ecosystem - those companies that amass and exploit large amounts of our data for profit.
Here’s some of the action we’ve taken:
In Nov 2018, after months of…