Search
Content type: News & Analysis
8th July 2011
Few understand why we focus on refugee privacy. Funders don’t understand it so don’t fund it; the public see the plight of refugees as seen on TV, not as a privacy issue; and often times the international community does everything it can to increase scrutiny of refugees. In this blog, I highlight the privacy issues facing refugees and how these issues can jeopardize refugees’ safety as much as any of the environmental, social, or political risks refugees encounter.
Refugees are amongst the…
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: News & Analysis
30th June 2017
The Privacy International Network recently submitted joint stakeholder reports for seven partner countries - India, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia - as part of the 27th session of the Universal Periodic Review (1 to 12 May 2017).
Communications surveillance was a major area of concern, as we observed that these policies and practices remain largely opaque, complex and vague. In some countries, they fail to meet human rights standards and principles of…
Content type: News & Analysis
30th January 2018
Privacy International is celebrating Data Privacy Week, where we’ll be talking about privacy and issues related to control, data protection, surveillance and identity. Join the conversation on Twitter using #dataprivacyweek.
If you were looking for a loan, what kind of information would you be happy with the lender using to make the decision? You might expect data about your earnings, or whether you’ve repaid a loan before. But, in the changing financial sector, we are seeing more and more…
Content type: News & Analysis
3rd June 2014
3 June 2014
The following article written by Carly Nyst, Privacy International's Legal Director, originially appeared on the Future Tense blog on Slate:
The news that the CIA is no longer using vaccination programs as a front for spying operations may come as a relief to many humanitarian workers. Yet their fears should not be completely assuaged, because the CIA’s activities—which undoubtedly threatened the safety of humanitarian workers and those they seek to help—pale in comparison to the…
Content type: Long Read
29th August 2018
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the United Nations-led initiative to define the development agenda. Building on the eight Millennium Development Goals, the SDG’s 17 goals – and the 169 targets – serve as an opportunity to tackle many of the most pressing issues in the world today. The SDGs are also explicitly grounded in human rights. Goal 16 on “peace, justice, and sustainable institutions” aims to “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide…
Content type: News & Analysis
16th January 2018
13 October 2013
The following is an excerpt from a guest article which appeared on openDemocracy, written by Privacy International's Research Officer, Anna Crowe:
Humanitarian actors often forsake the right to privacy in favour of promoting programmes utilising phones to deliver services, either through a lack of understanding or wilful ignorance as to the risks involved.
It is clear that the massive uptake of mobile phones in developing countries has played a crucial role in the success of…
Content type: Long Read
10th October 2019
Photo by Nadine Shaabana on Unsplash
Digital identity providers
Around the world, we are seeing the growth of digital IDs, and companies looking to offer ways for people to prove their identity online and off. The UK is no exception; indeed, the trade body for the UK tech industry is calling for the development of a “digital identity ecosystem”, with private companies providing a key role. Having a role for private companies in this sector is not necessarily a problem: after all, government…
Content type: Long Read
28th January 2020
It was a quiet evening in Agadez, a bustling Saharan city in the centre of Niger. Thirty-five year old Agali Ahmed was sipping tea at a friend’s place, as he often did, when he received a message: police were at his uncle’s house. When he got there, Ahmed saw men in plainclothes, standing around the building’s gate. Inside, more men were searching the apartment. Three white men, who Ahmed guessed were Spanish, asked for his phone and started taking pictures of him. They told him to follow them…
Content type: News & Analysis
20th November 2013
Humanitarian agencies are collecting personal information for Syrians caught in the crossfire of a drawn-out and bloody civil war. Indeed, refugees fleeing persecution and conflict, need to access services and protection offered by the world’s humanitarian community. But in the rush to provide necessary aid to those afflicted by the crisis in Syria, humanitarian organisations are overlooking a human right that also needs protecting: the right to privacy.
Humanitarian and aid agencies are…
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: Press release
11th December 2018
Key Points
A new report by Privacy International and the International Committee of the Red Cross finds that the humanitarian sector’s use of digital and mobile technologies could have detrimental effects for people receiving humanitarian aid.
This is because these digital systems generate a ‘data trail’ that is accessible and exploitable by third parties for non-humanitarian purposes. This metadata can be used to infer extremely intimate details, such as someone’s travel patterns or even…
Content type: Video
24th July 2020
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast where ever you normally find your podcasts:
Spotify
Apple podcasts
Google podcasts
Castbox
Overcast
Pocket Casts
Peertube
Youtube
Stitcher
And more...
Content type: News & Analysis
20th February 2013
Below is an excerpt of an article that recently appeared on Slate, written by our partner Kevin Donovon, a researcher at the University of Cape Town, and Carly Nyst, Head of International Advocacy at Privacy International:
"Move over, mobile phones. There’s a new technological fix for poverty: biometric identification. Speaking at the World Bank on April 24, Nandan Nilekani, director of India’s universal identification scheme, promised that the project will be “transformational.” It “uses the…
Content type: News & Analysis
One of the UN's largest aid programmes just signed a deal with the CIA-backed data monolith Palantir
12th February 2019
Last week, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) announced a partnership with Palantir, the controversial US-based data analytics company with deep links to US intelligence agencies. This is a deal that has serious consequences for the privacy and security of the 90-million-plus recipients of WFP aid each year. The reaction to the news that WFP and Palantir have entered into this partnership, amongst many in the data and development community was immediate, and visceral. After all, Palantir has a…
Content type: Long Read
23rd October 2018
Photo Credit: Max Pixel
The fintech sector, with its data-intensive approach to financial services, faces a looming problem. Scandals such as Cambridge Analytica have brought public awareness about abuses involving the use of personal data from Facebook and other sources. Many of these are the same data sets that the fintech sector uses. With the growth of the fintech industry, and its increase in power and influence, it becomes essential to interrogate this use of data by the fintech industry…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th November 2013
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: News & Analysis
8th February 2018
The following piece originally appeared on Linda Raftree's "Wait...What" blog, a site focusing on bridging community development and technology.
New technologies hold great potential for the developing world, and countless development scholars and practitioners have sung the praises of technology in accelerating development, reducing poverty, spurring innovation and improving accountability and transparency.
Worryingly, however, privacy is presented as a luxury that creates barriers to…
Content type: News & Analysis
3rd June 2020
Humanitarian organisations are defined by their commitment to core, apolitical principles, including: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence and to “do no harm”.
And yet the ways data and technology are being used in the world today are often far from being apolitical, humane, impartial, neutral and independent, and in many instances many actors are using technology to exploit people, failing to protect and empower many individuals and communities - in particular those most in need…
Content type: News & Analysis
21st August 2013
The development agenda is heralding a new cure-all for humanitarian and development challenges – data.
In the latest incarnation of the development world’s dominant paradigm, ICTs for Development, data is being embraced, analysed and monitored by companies, humanitarian organisations, aid donors and governments alike. Yet despite the promises of data evangelists that big and open data can revolutionise innovation, education, health care and infrastructure, the potential risks of data -…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th December 2018
Photo credit: Screenshot from video produced by ICRC, ‘What are metadata’, accessible here.
“The platform [Facebook] does not intentionally cause harm to users. Too often, however, Facebook’s business model allows harm to occur.”
The Editorial Board, The Financial Times, 2 December 2018
Imagine if a recipient of humanitarian aid was prevented from accessing a loan because they were deemed ‘uncreditworthy’ for receiving assistance? Or if a refugee was denied asylum because their…
Content type: News & Analysis
21st January 2014
Big data consists mainly of data that is openly available, created and stored. It includes public sector data such as national health statistics, procurement and budgetary information, and transport and infrastructure data. While big data may carry benefits for development initiatives, it also carries serious risks, which are often ignored. In pursuit of the promised social benefits that big data may bring, it is critical that fundamental human rights and ethical values are not cast aside.…
Content type: News & Analysis
Banning TikTok? It's time to fix the out-of-control data exploitation industry - not a symptom of it
4th August 2020
Chinese apps and tech companies have been at the forefront of the news recently. Following India's ban of 59 chinese apps in July, President Trump announced his desire to ban TikTok, shortly followed by his backing of Microsoft's intention to buy the US branch of its parent company ByteDance. Other than others lip syncing his public declaration, what does President Trump fear from this app, run by a firm, based in China?
It's all about that data
One clear answer emerges: the exploitation of…
Content type: Long Read
5th August 2019
Image credit: Emil Sjöblom [ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)]
Prepaid SIM card use and mandatory SIM card registration laws are especially widespread in countries in Africa: these two factors can allow for a more pervasive system of mass surveillance of people who can access prepaid SIM cards, as well as exclusion from important civic spaces, social networks, and education and health care for people who cannot.
Mandatory SIM card registration laws require that people provide personal…
Content type: News & Analysis
28th February 2013
The drive for accountability in aid spending has put humanitarian and development agencies under pressure to collect an ever-growing amount of data about those who receive their assistance. Donors also increasingly demand that new technologies are deployed to ensure aid reaches those it is targeted at; preventing people from fraudulently using refugees’ identities, for example, was a key motivation behind UNHCR’s recent introduction of biometric technology to register Syrian refugees in Jordan…
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…