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Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
Immediately after the app is opened, the following data is sent to graph.facebook.com (Graph)
Form data:
format: json
sdk: android…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
Immediately after the app is opened, the app sends the following HTTP GET request to graph.facebook.com
GET https://graph.facebook.com/v2.11/174829003346?fields=…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
Immediately after the app is opened, the following data is sent to graph.facebook.com (Graph)
format: json
sdk: android
event…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
Immediately after the app is opened, the following data is sent to graph.facebook.com (Graph)
The following HTTP GET request is made to graph.facebook.com
GET https://graph.facebook.…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
Immediately after the app is opened, the following data is sent to graph.facebook.com (Graph)
The following HTTP GET request is made to graph.facebook.com
GET https://graph.…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
The app sends the following HTTP GET request to graph.facebook.com
GET https://graph.facebook.com/v2.9/651942978220795?fields=supports_implicit_sdk_logging%2Cgdpv4_nux_content%…
Content type: Long Read
As our four year battle against the UK government’s extraordinarily broad and intrusive hacking powers goes to the Supreme Court, we are launching a new fundraising appeal in partnership with CrowdJustice.
We are seeking to raise £5k towards our costs and need your help. If we lose, the court may order us to pay for the government’s very expensive army of lawyers. Any donation you make, large or small, will help us both pursue this important case and protect the future ability of…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
Immediately after the app is opened, the following data is sent to graph.facebook.com (Graph)
Form data:
format: json
sdk: android…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the applicationResponse from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:Immediately after the app is opened, the following data is sent to graph.facebook.com (Graph)format: json
sdk: android
event…
Content type: App Analysis
This documentation demonstrates actions taken by the test user and the apps subsequent responses.
Test user action 1: The user taps on the application icon, which opens the application
Response from app: The application is initialised and the following data is sent and received by the app:
Immediately after the app is opened, the following data is sent to graph.facebook.com (Graph)
The following GET request was made:
GET https://graph.facebook.com/v3.1/97534753161…
Content type: Long Read
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…
Content type: Examples
In 2010, customers of the online shoe retailer Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon in 2009, began noticing that recommendations for products they had viewed on the site were following them around the web. The culprit was a then-new practice known as "retargeting", which uses cookies to identify users as they move around the web. The source was quickly - via links on the ads themselves - identified as the French company Criteo, which tells retailers its personalised banners will help them "…
Content type: Examples
In 2018, a week before the General Data Protection Regulation came into force in the EU, Quantcast and several other publishing industry groups complained that Google in an open letter that Google was imposing GDPR risks on publishers and consumers. Under the system Google proposed for GDPR compliance, Google would impose limits on the number of technical vendors publishers could work with, thereby limiting innovation and competition, had yet to commit to joining the IAB Europe's Transparency…
Content type: Examples
In September 2017, unrelated to the massive data breach the company simultaneously announced, Equifax withdrew its mobile apps from Apple's App Store and Google Play because of security flaws that meant that data transferred between users and Equifax was not encrypted in transmission. Given the flaws in implementing HTTPS, attackers could inject their own markup, including JavaScript - which in turn would allow them to ask for any information they wanted without any indication to the user that…
Content type: Examples
In 2017, a group of data brokers led by Acxiom, AppNexus, and MediaMath, and including Index Exchange, LiveIntent, OpenX, and Rocket Fuel,
launched a consortium to make targeted programmatic advertising more widely available. Part of the consortium's goal is to enable the companies involved to compete better with Google's Ad words and Facebook's ad platform, which together account for 48% of all digital advertising spend. The consortium also intended to create a common omnichannel, people-…
Content type: Long Read
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…
Content type: Examples
Google announced on October 8 having discovered a vulnerability in the Google+ API which has been open since 2015. This vulnerability allowed third-party developers to access data for more than 500,000 users, including their usernames, email addresses, occupation, date of birth, profile photos, and gender-related information. While Google only retains 2 weeks of activity logs and cannot assert the exact reach of the breach, it believes that up to 438 applications had access to these data.…
Content type: Explainer
In the digital economy there is a trend towards corporate concentration. This is true for social media platforms, search engines, smart phone operating systems, digital entertainment, or online retailers. Meanwhile, the way in which market dominance is measured traditionally does not always capture the extent of their control: firstly, their products and services are often “free” and secondly, it’s often not clear in which “markets” and “sectors” these companies operate, since there is so much…
Content type: Long Read
Yesterday, the European Court of Human Rights issued its judgement in Big Brother Watch & Others V. the UK. Below, we answer some of the main questions relating to the case.
What's the ruling all about?
In a nutshell, one of the world's most important courts, the European Court of Human Rights, yesterday found that certain UK laws about how intelligence agencies can spy on our internet communications breach our human rights. These surveillance laws have meant that the UK intelligence…
Content type: Long Read
The European Court of Human Rights ruled today that the UK government's mass interception program violates the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The Court held that the program "is incapable of keeping the 'interference' to what is 'necessary in a democratic society'". This finding is an important victory for human rights and the rule of law. Below, we break down the key parts of the decision.
The Court's ruling comes after a five-year battle against two UK mass surveillance…
Content type: News & Analysis
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
Just about everyone in Washington has found something to dislike about the tech industry: Democrats especially, are worried about foreign interference in the 2016 election — meanwhile some Republicans are more concerned about bias against conservatives of platforms and on top of it all President Trump has been tweeting about antitrust and competition.
Privacy International is a vocal critic of data exploitation more generally, and the systemic…
Content type: Advocacy
This photo originally appeared here.
For years, Privacy International and our partners in Kenya have been promoting the right to privacy in Kenya through research and investigations into government and private sector policies and practices and advocating for the adoption and enforcement of the strongest data protection and privacy safeguards.
The need for Kenya to adopt a comprehensive data protection framework (in addition to strengthening privacy protections in other legislation) has always…
Content type: Examples
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: Examples
In May 2018, Google announced an AI system to carry out tasks such as scheduling appointments over the phone using natural language. A Duplex user wanting to make a restaurant booking, for example, could hand the task off to Duplex, which would make the phone call and negotiate times and numbers. In announcing the service, Google stressed its use of "speech dysfluencies" - that is, non-verbal syllables such as "um" and "er" to make the interaction sound more natural.
The system almost…
Content type: Examples
In 2017 the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the US Federal Trade Commission asking the agency to block Google's Store Sales Measurement service, which the company introduced in May at the 2017 Google Marketing Next event. Google's stated goal was to link offline sales to online ad spending. EPIC argued that the purchasing information Google collected was highly sensitive, revealing details about consumers purchases, health, and private lives, and that Google was…
Content type: Examples
DoubleClick was one of the first companies set up to sell display advertising on the web. Set up in 1996, it went public in 1998, and in 1999 merged with the data collection company Abacus Direct. In response to a 2001 US Federal Trade Commission investigation of the proposed merger, DoubleClick promised to keep those two databases separate; and in 2005 when the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman acquired it, that firm promised to operate the company as two separate divisions. In April…
Content type: Examples
In 2012 the US Consumer Watchdog advocacy group filed a complaint against Google alleging that the company had violated its 2011 consent decree with the US Federal Trade Commission in the case about Google Buzz. The complaint was based on February 2012 revelations that the site was failing to honour do-not-track settings in Apple's Safari web browser. The browser itself was set by default to refuse to accept third-party cookies, as these are often used to track users across the web. Google's…
Content type: Examples
In 2009, Spanish citizen Mario Costeja González objected to the fact that an auction notice from 1998, when his home was repossessed, was still accessible on the website of the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia and the first thing people saw when they searched for him on Google. When the courts declined to order the newspaper to remove the announcement, Costeja asked Google Spain to stop linking to it in search results on his name. When Google did nothing more than forward the complaint to its…
Content type: Examples
In 2012, Google announced it would condense 70 different privacy policies into a single one that would allow the company to merge the data collected across all its services, including Maps, search, Android, Books, Chrome, Wallet, Gmail, and the advertising service provided by its DoubleClick subsidiary into a single database. The company claimed the purpose was to enable a better, more unified experience - for example, it said it would be able to deliver better search results by combining…
Content type: Examples
In 2010, increasing adoption of social media sites such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr led Google to develop Buzz, an attempt to incorporate status updates and media-sharing into its Gmail service. Users could link their various social media feeds, including Picasa (Google's photo-sharing service) and Reader (Google's RSS news reader), directly into Gmail. Via the integrated feed, Gmail users could see not only the content produced by those they followed, but those they didn't if their…