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Content Type: Advocacy
When it comes to elections around the world, we find ourselves in a terrain that is more and more populated by digital technologies, which have an increasingly critical impact upon the realisation of democracy. Digital technologies used in the context of elections offer new opportunities to support voter participation, whilst simultaneously posing increasing challenges for voters and those who manage and oversee elections. The introduction of technologies into electoral systems in countries…
Content Type: Long Read
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, major tech platforms have been rapidly evolving their business models. Despite their dominance in various markets, tech giants like Google and Meta are venturing into new territories to expand their user base. One of the most striking ventures has been their foray into the "connectivity market" through substantial, and occasionally unsuccessful, investments in network infrastructure.
Many tech companies are investing resources into network infrastructure, either…
Content Type: Report
First published in 2017, PI’s Guide to International Law and Surveillance is an attempt to collate relevant excerpts from these judgments and reports into a single principled guide that will be regularly updated. This is the fourth edition of the Guide. It has been updated it to reflect the most relevant legal developments until March 2024.The Guide aspires to be a handy reference tool for anyone engaging in campaigning, advocacy, and scholarly research, on these issues. The fourth…
Content Type: Long Read
Social media is now undeniably a significant part of many of our lives, in the UK and around the world. We use it to connect with others and share information in public and private ways. Governments and companies have, of course, taken note and built fortunes or extended their power by exploiting the digital information we generate. But should the power to use the information we share online be unlimited, especially for governments who increasingly use that information to make material…
Content Type: News & Analysis
We have been fighting for transparency and stronger regulation of the use of IMSI catchers by law enforcement in the UK since 2016. The UK police forces have been very secretive about the use of IMSI catchers – maintaining a strict “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) policy. In our efforts to seek greater clarity we wrote to the UK body which monitors the use of covert investigatory powers, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (IPCO), asking the Commissioner to revisit this…
Content Type: Long Read
What if your boss was an algorithm? What would you do if your employer suddenly fired you or reduced your pay without telling you why? And without being willing to give you a reason when you ask for one?
This is not science fiction or some far-fetched reality. Millions of people worldwide are working in the gig economy sector for companies like Uber, Deliveroo, Bolt, Just Eat… And this could be the future of work for people working outside the gig economy, as surveillance technologies are…
Content Type: Video
Update: Pa has since won a settlement from UberPlease note the views expressed in the video are interviewee's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of PI.Pa used to work for Uber. After some time, Uber started asking him to submit a picture of himself to the platform to confirm it was indeed him who had completed the job. However, with time, the frequency of the requests increased. In the beginning, the requests for a picture only happened once a week, but as time went by Pa told us that…
Content Type: News & Analysis
What if we told you that every photo of you, your family, and your friends posted on your social media or even your blog could be copied and saved indefinitely in a database with billions of images of other people, by a company you've never heard of? And what if we told you that this mass surveillance database was pitched to law enforcement and private companies across the world?
This is more or less the business model and aspiration of Clearview AI, a company that only received worldwide…
Content Type: Press release
Today, following an in-depth investigation, the UK Competition and Market Authority (CMA) assessed that the competition concerns can only be addressed by Facebook selling Giphy in its entirety. This is a very significant decision. Facebook, the largest provider of social media sites and display advertising in the UK, acquired Giphy, the largest provider of GIFs. The merger would further increase Facebook’s dominance and Facebook would have benefitted from Giphy’s data collection practices and…
Content Type: Press release
Dear TECNO,
We, the undersigned, don’t believe that privacy should be a luxury. And yet, when TECNO manufacture and sell phones with an outdated operating system, that’s the world TECNO are helping to create.
Our recent investigation into the TECNO Y2 showed that at least one TECNO phone is currently on sale with an operating system that hasn’t received updates since 2013. We are concerned because this is leaving users vulnerable to hundreds of well-known and serious exploits.
The Y2 was…
Content Type: Advocacy
Dear TECNO,
We, the undersigned, don’t believe that privacy should be a luxury. And yet, when TECNO manufacture and sell phones with an outdated operating system, that’s the world TECNO are helping to create.
Our recent investigation into the TECNO Y2 showed that at least one TECNO phone is currently on sale with an operating system that hasn’t received updates since 2013. We are concerned because this is leaving users vulnerable to hundreds of well-known and serious exploits.
The Y2 was…
Content Type: Advocacy
On 6 August 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) published its technical specifications and implementation guidance for “Digital Documentation of COVID-19 Certificates: Vaccination Status” (DDCC:VS) following months of consultations. As governments around the world are deploying their own Covid-19 certificates, guidance from the global health agency was expected to set a global approach, and one that prioritises public health. As such, we would expect the WHO to identify what these…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Today, the European Commission has concluded its Phase II in-depth review of the proposed acquisition of the health and fitness tracker Fitbit by Google, deciding that the merger can go through. While we welcome the commitments put forward by Google to mitigate some risks of compromising individuals' rights and competition, PI considers the effects of this merger will further strengthen Google's capacity to exploit our data.
On 15 June 2020, Google formally notified the European Commission of…
Content Type: Long Read
In 2019, we exposed the practices of five menstruation apps that were sharing your most intimate data with Facebook and other third parties. We were pleased to see that upon the publication of our research some of them decided to change their practices. But we always knew the road to effective openness, transparency, informed consent and data minimisation would be a long one when it comes to apps, which for the most part make profit from our menstrual cycle and even sometimes one’s desire to…
Content Type: News & Analysis
An excerpt of this piece was first published in June 2020 in Adbusters, an international not-for-profit magazine produced by a global collective of artists and activists who want to 'shake up complacent consumer culture'.
Big oil. Big tobacco. Big pharma. How did we let ‘big tech’ happen? You would have thought humanity would learn its lesson. That nothing good comes of the mass accumulation and concentration of power into the hands of so few.
The internet was meant to be different. No…
Content Type: Advocacy
International data transfers are an important feature of the present-day global economy. However, when crossing borders, data should also be accompanied by strong and effective privacy and personal data protections. Laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), play an important role in ensuring data flows respect with privacy.
Trade negotiations that cover cross-border data flows can complicate this. All 80 countries that are part of digital trade negotiations should be able to…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Privacy International (PI) welcomes today's report from the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) into three credit reference agencies (CRAs) which also operate as data brokers for direct marketing purposes. As a result, the ICO has ordered the credit reference agency Experian to make fundamental changes to how it handles people's personal data within its offline direct marketing services.
It is a long overdue enforcement action against Experian.…
Content Type: Press release
The new satirical video is a critique of the government's reliance on 'technological solutionism' in the fight against Coronavirus and increasingly across public services more widely, and their willingness to then scapegoat ‘mutant algorithms’ when their hopes for technological panaceas inevitably fail.
The two-minute video splices together clips of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, cleverly editing his speeches so that he mouths sentences such as:
'Coronavirus won’t affect you if your immunity…
Content Type: Long Read
An edited version of this article was originally published on the EDRi website in September 2020.
Introduction
Monopolies, mergers and acquisitions, anti-trust laws. These may seem like tangential or irrelevant issues for privacy and digital rights organisations. But having run our first public petition opposing a big tech merger, we wanted to set out why we think this is an important frontier for people's rights across Europe and indeed across the world.
In June, Google notified the…
Content Type: Case Study
Privacy matters. It matters when you’re walking the streets of your home town and when you’re fleeing your home in search of safety. It matters if you’re at a protest or if you’re in bed.
Our wellbeing in each of these instances depends on the protection of our privacy. No situation can be fully understood in isolation.
Unjustifiable intrusions on our privacy become a weapon to eradicate communities and prey upon refugees and asylum seekers, push people away from protests in fear of…
Content Type: Case Study
Numerous sexist, mysoginistic, homophobic and racist practices are flourishing online, in ways that are harder for national authorities to stop than when abuse takes place offline. One of these practices is ‘revenge pornography’, which involves online distribution of private sexual images without the consent of the person depicted.
One victim of image based sexual abuse (more commonly known as revenge porn): Chrissy Chambers. Chrissy was 18 years old when her boyfriend convinced her to spend…
Content Type: News & Analysis
New technologies continue to present great risks and opportunities for any users but for some communities the implications and harms can have severe consequences and one of the sectors facing increasing challenges to keep innovating whilst protecting themselves and the people they serve is the humanitarian sector.
Over the course of engagement with the humanitarian sector, one of our key observations has been how risk assessments undertaken in the sector omitted to integrate a hollistic…
Content Type: Press release
MI6 has been forced to apologise to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal after two of its officers asked court staff to return documents relating to MI6’s use of agents and not show them to judges. The Tribunal suggested MI6’s actions were “inappropriate interference”.
The revelation emerged in an ongoing legal case considering what crimes intelligence informants are allowed to commit, after it was revealed that MI5 maintains a secret policy under which agents can be “authorised” to…
Content Type: Video
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Useful info
How to minimise targeted ads: privacyinternational.org/act/minimise-targeted-ads
Protect yourself from online tracking: privacyinternational.org/act/protect-yourself-online-tracking
Social media account settings: privacyinternational.org/act/protect-…
Content Type: News & Analysis
In September 2019, PI published the report Your Mental Health for Sale. Our investigation looked into popular mental health websites and their data sharing practices.
Our findings suggest that, at the time of the research, most websites we looked at were using third party tracking for advertising purposes, sometimes relying on programmatic advertising technologies such as Real Time Bidding (RTB), sharing personal data with potentially thousands of actors. Some websites were also found sharing…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Name: Google/Fitbit merger
Age: Gestating
Appearance: A bit dodgy. One of the world’s biggest tech giants, trying to purchase a company that makes fitness tracking devices, and therefore has huge amounts of our health data.
I don’t get it. Basically Google is trying to buy Fitbit. As if Google doesn’t already have enough data about us, it now wants huge amounts of health data too.
Oh, Fitbit, that’s that weird little watch-type-thing that people get for Christmas, wear for about a month…
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
Monday, 16 June 2025
It’s 7:33 am. Lila’s GoogBit watch vibrates. “You got 6 hours and 57 minutes of sleep last night, including 2 hours and 12 minutes of deep sleep”, the watch reads. “In total, you tossed and turned for 15 minutes only”. Taking into account Lila’s online browsing activity, her sleep pattern, the recent disruptions in some of her other biorhythms, as well as her daily schedule, GoogBit watch has calculated the very best minute to wake her up.
Content Type: Press release
Today, the ICO has issued a long-awaited and critical report on Police practices regarding extraction of data from people's phones, including phones belonging to the victims of crime.
The report highlights numerous risks and failures by the police in terms of data protection and privacy rights. The report comes as a result of PI’s complaint, dating back to 2018, where we outlined our concerns about this intrusive practice, which involves extraction of data from devices of victims, witnesses…
Content Type: Press release
On 15 June 2020, Google formally notified the European Commission of its proposed acquisition of Fitbit, enabling them to capture a massive trove of sensitive health data that will expand and entrench its digital dominance. Privacy International is calling on EU regulators to block the merger.
In November 2019, Google announced its plan to acquire Fitbit, a company that produces and sells health tracking technologies and wearables - including smartwatches, health trackers and smart scales -…