Educational

In 2018, British immigration officers demanded that the mothers of two children provide DNA samples in order to provide proof of paternity. The children both had British fathers and had previously been issued British passports, but their mothers were not UK citizens. In one case, the father had

In May 2018, the ACLU of Northern California obtained documents under a FOIA request showing that Amazon was essentially giving away its two-year-old Rekognition facial recognition tools to law enforcement agencies in Oregon and Orlando, Florida. Amazon defended the move by saying the technology has

At the 2017 Champions League Final, South Wales Police deployed an automated facial recognition system that wrongly identified more than 2,000 people in Cardiff as potential criminals. The system's cameras watched 170,000 people arrive in Cardiff for the football match between Real Madrid and

In August 2018, two lawsuits, were filed against NSO Group, one brought in Israel by a Qatari citizen and the other in Cyprus by Mexican journalists and activists. All the plaintiffs had been targeted by the company's Pegasus spyware, which takes control of targets' phones when they click on links

In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party's anti-corruption watchdog in southeastern Hefei in the Anhul province claimed in a social media post that its branch in a neighbouring city had retrieved deleted messages from a suspect's WeChat account. Tencent, WeChat's operator, denied that the company stored

In what appears to be an extension of China's tracking of its Muslim citizens, 3,300 of the 11,500 Chinese pilgrims joining the 2018 hajj to Mecca were outfitted with GPS trackers. When photos were shown of the first group preparing to depart wearing trackers around their necks, the state-run

In 2018 genetic testing companies such as Ancestry and 23andMe agreed on guidelines for sharing users' DNA data and handling police requests. The guidelines, which include easy-to-read privacy policies, were inspired by two incidents: one in which local investigators used the GEDmatch DNA comparison

In 2018 a report from the Royal United Services Institute found that UK police were testing automated facial recognition, crime location prediction, and decision-making systems but offering little transparency in evaluating them. An automated facial recognition system trialled by the South Wales

In September 2018 the UK's Information Commissioner found that it was likely that during 2017 a number of migrant rough sleepers were reported to the Home Office enforcement teams by the homelessness charity St. Mungo's. The finding followed a complaint from the Public Interest Law Unit. The charity

In internet scans conducted between August 2016 and August 2018, Canada's Citizen Lab identified a total of 45 countries in which operators of Israel-based NSO Group's Pegasus spyware may be conducting surveillance operations. Pegasus is mobile phone spyware that targets are coerced into installing

Following a 2016 hack including names, emails, adresses, and phone numbers of 57 millions Uber users and drivers, the company has paid 100,000 USD to hackers hoping that the data collected would be deleted. This decision was in line with Uber's strategy to try to keep the breach quiet while limiting

At the end of September 2018, the sales intelligence company and data aggregator Apollo notified its customers that over the summer Vinny Troia, the founder of Night Lion Security, had discovered that Apollo's database of 212 million contact listings and 9 billion data points relating to companies

In July 2018, attackers broke into the SingHealth Singaporean government health database and stole names, addresses, and various other details of 1.5 million people who visited clinics between May 1, 2015 and July 4, 2018; however, the attackers did not gain access to most medical records with the

In July 2018, a hacker attack exposed the personal data of millions of Spanish subscribers Telefónica's Movistar service. The data included identity and payment information, phone and national ID numbers, banks, and calling data. The cause was a basic programming error known as an "enumeration bug"

In July 2018, the leader of a private Facebook group for women with the BRCA gene, which is associated with high breast cancer risk, discovered that a Chrome plug-in was allowing marketers to harvest group members' names and other information. The group was concerned that exposure might lead to

In June 2018, security researcher Vinny Troia discovered that the Florida-based data broker Exactis had exposed a comprehensive database containing nearly 340 million individual records on a publicly accessible server. The 2TB of data appeared to include detailed information on millions of