Identity

In July 2011, the established writer GrrlScientist tried to log into her Google account and found that it was suspended, barring her access to Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, Google Reader, and the newly launched social network Google+. It turned out that the reason was then when Google launched its

In 2015, the University of Arizona began tracking freshman students’ ID card swipes as part of a project to try to lower the rate at which students drop out or leave for another university. The cards, which include an embedded sensor and are given to all students, can be read at almost 700 locations

On August 1, 2017, Wisconsin company Three Square Market began offering its employees the option of implanting a tiny chip between their thumb and index finger. The chip enables employees to wave at hand at any of the company's RFID readers in order to enter the building, pay for food in the

Like other countries, the US began incorporating RFID chips into its passports in 2006. The chips, which store passport information including name, date of birth, passport number, photo, and biometric identifiers, enable machine-readable border controls like those now seen at an increasing number of

In February 2018 the Home Office gave the Yorkshire Police 250 scanners that use a smartphone app to run mobile fingerprint checks against the UK's criminal fingerprint and biometrics database (IDENT1) and the Immigration and Asylum Biometrics System (IABS). The app was simultaneously made available

In February 2018, police in China began using connected sunglasses equipped with facial recognition to scan crowds looking for suspected criminals. In a test at a busy train station in the city of Zhengzhou, police were able to identify and apprehend seven suspects accused of crimes ranging from hit

In 2014, researchers at Princeton University outlined an attack that uses multiple third-party cookies to link traffic so that individual users can be identified and tracked from anywhere in the world. A nation-state wishing to surveil particular users outside its jurisdiction, for example, may have

In a letter accompanying his annual report to the Prime Minister for 2017, the British Interception of Communications Commissioner, Stanley Burnton, has expressed concern about the increasingly unacceptable number of errors police are making in resolving Internet Protocol addresses. Because of the

Our usual image of online advertising is that we are one of millions whose data is being examined by a large, remote organisation - a government or major company. Research from the University of Washington has found that anyone equipped with time, determination, and a relatively small budget of $1

A 2016 study from the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation found that in 95% of cases it takes as few as four of the apps users have installed on their smartphones to reidentify them within a dataset. Based on a study of 54,893 Android users over seven months, the

In 2015, Chinese hackers stole sensitive information including social security numbers and residency, employment, educational, and medical histories concerning more than 21 million people from the US Office of Personnel Management. OPM houses this information about all federal employees along with

In March 2016, a hacker group identifying itself as Anonymous Philippines defaced the website of the Philippine Commission on the Elections (Comelec), leaving a message that accused Comelec of not doing enough to secure the voting machines due to be used in the general election the following month

In 2017 two Metropolitan police officers were jailed for five years for hacking into the force's intelligence database and leaking the identity of a protected witness to the defence lawyer in a 2011 murder trial that eventually saw the defendant, Leon De St Aubin, convicted. While the trial was in

In a 2015 study of 79 apps listed in NHS England's Health Apps Library, which tests programs to ensure they meet standards of clinical and data safety, researchers at Imperial College London discovered that 70 of them sent personal data to associated online services and 23 sent that data without

In 2015, a data leak apparently linked to the new Uber partner app exposed the personal information of hundreds of drivers, including their Social Security numbers, scanned drivers' licences, tax forms, and other documents. The information was likely to have been available for at least a few hours