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Content Type: Examples
In 2014, when the the far-right party of French politician Marine Le Pen needed cash, the loan of €9.4 million came from First Czech-Russian Bank, which was founded in the early 2000s as a joint venture between a Czech state bank and a Russian lender and went on to come under the personal ownership of Russian financier Roman Popov and obtain a European license via a subsidiary in the Czech Republic. Two and a half months after the Le Pen loan was signed, a Mediapart investigative journalist…
Content Type: Examples
In 2015, officials within the US Treasury Department Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes unit used a network of private Gmail and Hotmail accounts set up by the Russians with the stated goal of jointly defeating ISIS. Soon, however, instead the Russian financial crimes agency was using the back channel to seek sensitive information on enemies in the US and elsewhere - individuals such as the newspaper publisher Alexander Lebedev, a company tied to the Panama Papers, and nearly…
Content Type: Examples
As part of the digital campaign to win re-election, in mid-2018 the BJP, which controls the Indian national government as well as that of the state of Chhattisbarh, handed out $71 million worth of free phones and subsidised data plans to 2.9 million of the state's voters and then used the phones to target prospective voters. The plan's stated purpose was to bridge the digital divide in the state, which has a population of 26 million; hundreds of cellphone towers are supposed to be added to…
Content Type: Examples
A December 2018 analysis found that Facebook's measures for improving election security and discouraging anonymous political messages were poorly executed and inconsistently applied, and placed an unfair burden on charitable organisations and small businesses while simultaneously being easy for organised and well-funded actors to bypass. Facebook blocked non-profits such as New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Arts Japan 2020, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts from promoting "harmless" postings.…
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During the campaign leading up to the 2018 US midterm elections, the email accounts of four senior aides at the National Republican Congressional Committee were surveilled for several months. The intrusion was detected in April 2018 by an NRCC vendor, who alerted the committee and its cybersecurity contractor; the NRCC then began an internal investigation and alerted the FBI. House Republicans did not learn of the incident until Politico called the NRCC with questions about the attack in…
Content Type: Examples
In November 2018, the Spanish senate approved 220-21 an online data protection law intended to ensure compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation with an added amendment that allowed political parties to use personal data obtained from web pages and other publicly accessible sources for political purposes during campaign periods. Spain's Platform for the Defence of Freedom of Information criticised the law's potential to allow parties to create ideological profiles and emulate the…
Content Type: Examples
A December 2018 report prepared by the Oxford Internet Institute's Computational propaganda Research Project and the network analysis firm Graphika for the US Senate Intelligence Committee found that the campaign conducted by Russia's Internet Research Agency during the 2016 US presidential election used every major social media platform to deliver messages in words, images, and videos to help elect Donald Trump - and stepped up efforts to support him once he assumed office. The report relied…
Content Type: Examples
In the run-up to the May 2019 European Parliament elections, Google announced it would launch a new set of transparency tools to combat voter manipulation. Before being allowed to buy advertising on Google platforms, campaigns will be required to verify their identity, and approved ads will be required to display the identity of their purchaser. Google will build a real-time searchable database of all political ads and show their purchasers, costs, and demographics. Facebook announced similar…
Content Type: Examples
A 2018 study found that Twitter bots played a disproportionate role in spreading the false claim, made by US President Donald Trump shortly after winning the election but losing the popular vote in November 2016, that 3 million illegal immigrants had voted for Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton. After examining 14 million messages shared on Twitter between May 2016 and May 2017, Indiana University researchers found that just 6% of Twitter accounts identified as bots spread 31% of "low-…
Content Type: Examples
Facebook's latest tool for inspecting political ads showed that in the run-up to the US mid-term elections in November 2018, many of the same politicians who had been questioning Facebook about privacy and leaked user data were spending campaign funds on advertisements on the service. Between 2014 and 2018, the digital percentage of political spending rose from 1% to 22% (or about $1.9 billion); between May and November 2018 political spending on Facebook and its subsidiaries came to nearly $…
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In November 2018, the UK government announced that 11 local authorities across England would participate in Voter ID pilots in the interest of gaining "further insight into how best to ensure the security of the voting process and reduce the risk of voter fraud". Five local authorities participated in pilots in the 2017 general election. The new pilots will test four models of identification checks: photo ID (Pendle, East Staffordshire, Woking), photo and non-photo ID (Ribble Valley, Broxtowe,…
Content Type: Examples
In June 2018 Apple updated its app store policies to bar developers from collecting information from users' address books and selling it on. While some apps have a legitimate need to access users' contacts, collecting information unnecessarily is a common money-making tactic. How many apps were affected by the change is unknown.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/06/13/apple-is-ending-apps-ability-to-secretly-sell-your-contacts-list/
writer: Hayley Tsukayama
publication:…
Content Type: Examples
In June 2018, a panel set up to examine the partnerships between Alphabet's DeepMind and the UK's NHS express concern that the revenue-less AI subsidiary would eventually have to prove its value to its parent. Panel chair Julian Huppert said DeepMind should commit to a business model, either non-profit or reasonable profit, and noted the risk that otherwise Alphabet would push the company to use its access to data to drive monopolistic profits. In that case, DeepMind would either have to…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, the Spanish La Liga app was found to be using the microphone and GPS to clamp down on bars infringing copyright by broadcasting matches without paying. Granting the app the permissions it requests at installation to access the mic and GPS location allows it to turn on the mic at any time. The company says that the audio clips it picks up are converted automatically into binary codes to identify illegal streams but are never listened to.
https://www.joe.co.uk/sport/la-liga-uses-its-…
Content Type: Examples
By 2018, Palantir, founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel to supply tools for finding obscure connections by analysing a wide range of data streams to the Pentagon and the CIA for the War on Terror, was supplying its software to the US Department of Health and Human Services to detect Medicare fraud, to the FBI for criminal probes, and to the Department of Homeland Security to screen air travellers and monitor immigrants. It was also supplying its software to police and sheriff's departments in New…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, the Brazil-based Coding Rights' feminist online cybersecurity guide Chupadados undertook a study of four popular period-tracking apps to find which best protected user privacy. Most, they found, rely on collecting and analysing data in order to be financially viable. The apps track more than just periods and ovulation; they ask for many intimate details about women's activities and health. The group found that the most trustworthy app was Clue, which is ad-free and optionally password-…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, an investigation found that children as young as nine in Hong Kong were exposing their identities online via Tik Tok, the most-downloaded iPhone app for creating and sharing short videos. Both Tik Tok and its sibling app Musical.ly, which is popular in Europe, Australia, and the US and allows users to create short lip-synched music videos - are owned by the Chinese company Bytedance. Tik Tok's service agreement says the app is not for use by those under 16. The app has only two options…
Content Type: Examples
A 2018 law passed in Egypt requires ride-hailing services such as Uber and local competitor Careem to supply passenger data to the security agencies when requested to do so. More than 4 million people in Egypt have used Uber since it debuted there in 2014. While human rights advocates expressed concern at the weakness of the standard in the legislation, Uber called it a "progressive" regulation. A prior draft of the bill called for the data to be provided in real time and required the company…
Content Type: Examples
In November 2018 New York City's housing committee ruled that Airbnb must turn over the addresses and host names that use its service to the city's Office of Special Enforcement as part of a crackdown on illegal operators. The hotel industry contended in a report earlier in the year that around two-thirds of Airbnb's income from New York, which is one of Airbnb's top five markets, comes from rentals that violate the rule in most apartment buildings barring rentals of less than 30 days unless…
Content Type: Examples
As part of efforts to tone down street fights at night Statumseind in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the city has deployed technology: wifi trackers, cameras, and microphones attached to lamp posts detect aggressive behaviour and alert police. The data collected by these sensors is used to profile, nudge, or actively target people. However, the area does not notify visitors that data is being collected and kept. The eastern Dutch city of Enschede uses smartphones' wifi signals to identify and…
Content Type: Examples
In May 2018, Slice Technologies, which provides the free Unroll.me email management service in return for data-mining individuals' email inboxes, announced it would discontinue offering its service in Europe rather than comply with the incoming General Data Protection Regulation. Unroll.me's privacy policy claims the right to share users' information with a range of third parties, and the company is known to have provided statistics about its users' Lyft receipts to Uber.
https://techcrunch.…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, changes to Apple's rules for data collection led Facebook to withdraw its Onavo Protect VPN app from the app store. The app's function was to warn users when they were visiting potentially harmful websites and protected their data when using public wifi. However, the app also collected data on the other apps installed on the device, monitoring that violates Apple's changed rules. In response to accusations that Facebook used the data to identify and acquire competitors, the company…
Content Type: Examples
Semi-autonomous cars with built-in internet connections are increasingly being delivered with location tracking in place. Marketed as a convenience, the app FordPass links to Ford's Sync Infotainment system and can log frequent and recently visited locations. Similarly, GM Onstar's Family Link allows remote users to track family memories and receive alerts about the car's location. Although Ford says a "master reset" restores the car's factory settings, these systems still leave victims of…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2018, domestic abuse victims, their lawyers, shelter workers, and emergency responders began finding that the Internet of Things was becoming an alarming new tool for harassment, monitoring, revenge, and control. Smartphone apps enable abusers to remotely control everyday objects inside their targets homes and use them to watch, listen, scare, or intimidate. Lack of knowledge about how the technology works and uncertainty about how much control the abusive partner has add a…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2018 the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first over-the-counter digital contraceptive, an app called Natural Cycles. The app, which analyses basal body temperature readings and monthly menstruation data to determine whether unprotected sex is likely to lead to pregnancy, sparked many public complaints of inaccuracy. Users pay $80 a year or $10 a month to use the app. However, the app's privacy policy also awards the Swedish maker broad rights to reuse and share the data…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2018, banks and merchants had begun tracking the physical movements users make with input devices - keyboard, mouse, finger swipes - to aid in blocking automated attacks and suspicious transactions. In some cases, however, sites are amassing tens of millions of identifying "behavioural biometrics" profiles. Users can't tell when the data is being collected. With passwords and other personal information used to secure financial accounts under constant threat from data breaches, this…
Content Type: Examples
In 2018, Wells Fargo disclosed that due to a computer bug that remained undiscovered for nearly five years 600 customers were granted more expensive mortgage loans than they could have qualified for. About 400 of them went on to lose their homes. The announcement reignited the public anger and distrust created by the bank's 2016 fake accounts scandal, which was attributed to a hard-driving, aggressive, pervasive sales culture that is difficult to change.
https://www.ft.com/content/dbc1d692-…
Content Type: Examples
In August 2018 Amazon rolled out a software update to Fire OS 5, the operating system used by older versions of its Fire TV and Fire TV Stick devices to counteract malware. At risk were versions of the devices before the company released Fire OS 6 whose owners had turned on Android Debug Bridge in order to sideload applications that aren't directly available from Amazon's app store. Fire OS 6 makes clearer the risk people were taking, as does the patched Fire OS 5.2.6.6. The malware will still…
Content Type: Examples
In September 2018, Google was discovered to be prototyping a search engine, codenamed Dragonfly, designed to comply with China's censorship regime. Among other features, Dragonfly would tie users' searches to their personal phone numbers, ensuring the government could track their queries. Among the terms on Google's Mandarin-language blacklist: "human rights", "student protest", and "Nobel prize". One Google source suggested Dragonfly would also force on users potentially manipulated Chinese-…
Content Type: Examples
Cookies and other tracking mechanisms are enabling advertisers to manipulate consumers in new ways. For $29, The Spinner will provide a seemingly innocent link containing an embedded cookie that will allow the buyer to deliver targeted content to their chosen recipient. The service advertises packages aimed at men seeking to influence their partners to initiate sex, people trying to encourage disliked colleagues to seek new jobs, and teens trying to get their parents to get a dog. However,…