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Content type: Long Read
Now more than ever with a global pandemic happening, our lives are being shaped by our interaction with the digital world. Work meetings on Zoom followed by Skype with family before a quick run with your favourite running app and a Google search for your next meal: technologies and services offer us a lot and greatly improve our daily lives. But what's the real cost of these tools we rely on so much?
A lot of these companies, especially those offering free services, collect data about you. It…
Content type: Examples
Article extract- translated from the original French.
"A political big data company with close ties to the federal liberals and which worked on Emmanuel Macron's campaign in France is setting up its head office in Old Montreal to continue its growth and take advantage of Montreal's digital vitality.
Data Sciences inc. (DS) was born from the victory of the Liberal Party of Canada (PLC) in the last election. Tom Pitfield, a close friend of Justin Trudeau, was leading digital operations during…
Content type: Frequently Asked Questions
On 27 October 2020, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) issued a report into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) - Experian, Equifax and TransUnion - which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes.
After our initial reaction, below we answer some of the main questions regarding this report.
Content type: Video
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…
Content type: Long Read
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: Examples
In 2016, researchers discovered that the personalisation built into online advertising platforms such as Facebook is making it easy to invisibly bypass anti-discrimination laws regarding housing and employment. Under the US Fair Housing Act, it would be illegal for ads to explicitly state a preference based on race, colour, religion, gender, disability, or familial status. Despite this, some policies - such as giving preference to people who already this - work to ensure that white…
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…