Educational

Examples, Explainer, Educational Case Study, Course, Guide

10 Apr 2019
In an effort to improve political advertising transparency, Canada drafted a Bill that requires companies to develop ad libraries, to which ads are added immediately in order for researchers, journalists, and other people to be able to search and understand how political actors are targeting ads. In
17 May 2019
Political ads on Facebook are meant to be marked with a disclaimer that says who paid for the ad, as well as be archived into the platform’s ad library, where users are able to see more information about how an ad was targeted. It’s important to note that the ‘who paid for the ad’ requirement is
17 Apr 2019
The two leading Presidential candidates in Ukraine's 2019 elections have expressed frustration at major social media platform's seemingly lack of assistance combatting disinformation and bots. Bots flood social media networks and can promote content or flood platforms with pull requests to have a
15 May 2019
Facebook's efforts to remove disinformation in the wake of the 2019 Ukrainian Presidential election have so far failed. Politico reports that "Among the Facebook pages that spread spurious claims during the election was one with more than 100,000 followers that ran a video claiming (the Presidential
18 Mar 2019
Volunteers for Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelenskiy were tasked with pouring over social media sites to search for disinformation and combat bot armies that spread negative comments about the candidate. Facebook has been slow to take down 'fake news' and so the volunteers search social media
12 Sep 2018
Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection authorities against Google and other ad tech firms. The complainants are being made by Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, the private web browser, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, and Michael Veale of University
28 Jan 2019
Panoptykon Foundation, the Warsaw based digital rights organization, has joined in the complaints filed in the UK and Ireland in September by Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, Michael Veale of University College London, and Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, by filing a new complaint in Poland. Together
02 May 2019
The Irish Data Protection Commission has today launched an inquiry into the data practices of ad-tech company Quantcast, a major player in the online tracking industry. PI's 2018 investigation and subsequent submission to the Irish DPC showed how the company is systematically collecting and
08 Nov 2018
Privacy International has filed complaints against seven data brokers (Acxiom, Oracle), ad-tech companies (Criteo, Quantcast, Tapad), and credit referencing agencies (Equifax, Experian) with data protection authorities in France, Ireland, and the UK. It’s been more than five months since the EU’s
01 Apr 2019
Dr Johnny Ryan filed a formal complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission against IAB Europe, the tracking industry’s primary lobbying organization. The complaint was filed against IAB Europe’s use of an unlawful “cookie wall” on its website. Visitors to IAB Europe’s website, www.iabeurope
Key Resources

Ukraine held Presidential elections in April 2019. In the run up to the election, there was much debate on the role of Facebook.

25 Jan 2019
In January 2019 the UK's Information Commissioner's Office announced it was investigating an incident in which the food service company Deliveroo reported that some of its customers had complained they were charged up to £1,000 for orders they had not placed. Customers have used social media to
21 Feb 2019
In August 2018, Apple forced Facebook to remove its Onava VPN from the App Store because the Facebook had been using it to harvest data across multiple apps and track user activity. In January 2019, a TechCrunch investigation revealed that in a separate part of the same programme Facebook had been