Educational

In 2015, a small number of Silicon Valley start-ups began experimenting with assessing prospective borrowers in developing countries such as Kenya by inspecting their smartphones. Doing so, they claimed, enabled them to charge less in interest than more traditional microlenders, since many of their

In 2015, Ant Financial, a Chinese company affiliated with Alibaba, began deploying "Sesame Credit scores". Ant, which also runs the popular payment app Alipay, claims that it uses both online and offline purchasing and spending habits to calculate a credit worthiness score for each of its more than

In the past, car insurers relied on drivers to report their annual mileage when renewing their policies. Increasingly, however, insurers are turning to other methods. In 2016, State Farm, a US insurance company, acknowledged that the company verifies the mileage driven by the cars it insures in a

In 2016 researchers in China claimed an experimental algorithm could correctly identify criminals based on images of their faces 89% of the time. The research involved training an algorithm on 90% of a dataset of 1,856 photos of Chinese males between 18 and 55 with no facial hair or markings. Among

In 2016 researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Cornell University demonstrated that a neural network trained on image datasets can successfully identify faces and objects that have been blurred, pixellated, or obscured by the P3 privacy system. In some cases, the algorithm performed

In 2015, Facebook's AI lab announced that its researchers had devised an experimental algorithm that could recognise people in photographs even when their faces are hidden or turned away. The researchers trained a sophisticated neural network on a dataset of 40,000 photographs taken from Flickr

In 2016, Facebook gave conflicting accounts of whether the service uses location data in order to recommend prospective Friends in its "People You May Know" feature. When the company first admitted - for publication - that location data was indeed one of the signals it used, many users felt this

In 2016, Facebook and Google began introducing ways to measure the effectiveness of online ads by linking them to offline sales and in-store visits. Facebook's measurement tools are intended to allow stores to see how many people visit in person after seeing a Facebook campaign, and the company

In September 2016, the US Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop to study the impact of big data analysis on poor people, whose efforts to escape poverty may be hindered by the extensive amounts of data being gathered about them. Among those who intensively surveil low-income communities are

In 2016, supporters of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul for president were surprised to begin getting emails from the Trump campaign soon after their candidates dropped out of the race for the Republican nomination. In an investigation, CNNMoney found that nearly every failed 2016 presidential candidate sold

In 2016, researchers affiliated with Verto Analytics and the Qatar Computing Research Institute published work in which they analysed the app usage and demographics of more than 3,700 people in order to find correlations. Based on the models they developed, they found they could predict a user's

In 2016, Verbraucherzentrale NRW, a consumer protection organisation in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia accused Samsung of harvesting data and sending it back to the company over the internet without informing users as soon as its smart televisions are connected to the internet. The

In 2016, VICE News discovered that the confidential and "shadowy" World-Check database, which has wrongly linked individuals to terrorist activity, was being widely used by British police and intelligence. Also a customer is the Charity Commission, which uses it to screen charities and aid

In 2016, the US's third-largest property and casualty insurer, Liberty Mutual, announced it would partner with Subaru to enable drivers who have bought Subaru's Starlink infotainment system to download a car app that will notify them if they are accelerating too aggressively or braking too hard. The

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 2016 Jonathan Evans, the former head of Britain's MI5 warned that private firms are analysing "open source" - that is, publicly posted - information to create profiles that are just as intrusive as anything Britain's intelligence agencies deploy and that the gap is closing between open