Share this page!

Privacy International Profile picture
Twitter logo
Aug 5 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
🆕 @NicolaKelly reports in the @guardian on @ukhomeoffice plans to surveil migrants through smartwatches, informed by our @LucieCAudibert. We’ve been investigating this latest stride in the UK’s cruel migration policies.

A thread🧵
Organisations like @BIDdetention and @migrantsorg alerted us a while ago to the roll-out of GPS ankle tags to monitor migrants released on immigration bail.
biduk.org/articles/805-b…
GPS tags are a dehumanising, invasive method of control that monitors people’s precise location 24/7.
The Home Office knows where they’ve been, when, every second of the day.

privacyinternational.org/explainer/4796…
In an effort to monitor even more people and reach levels of total surveillance, the Home Office now wants to roll out smartwatches also recording 24/7 location data AND requiring people to scan their faces up to 5 times a day.
This is meant to be “less invasive” & “more proportionate” than GPS ankle tags.

Who is the Home Office trying to fool?

Facial recognition is a dangerous, discriminatory tech - it regularly misidentifies people of colour & is disproportionately used against minorities.
Wearables are the last frontier in total digitalisation and surveillance of our lives, leading to inevitable human rights abuses when used by powerful institutions against vulnerable populations.
Combined, they form an instrument of total surveillance and control.

This is why we made submissions to the @IndependentCI to denounce this cruel Home Office practice.

privacyinternational.org/report/4866/pi…
This is, sadly, just one of the myriad callous facets of the UK #HostileEnvironment, which we and migrant rights organisations will keep condemning.

privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/…
And here is the DPIA that sets out the Home Office's sinister plans: privacyinternational.org/sites/default/…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Privacy International

Privacy International Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @privacyint

Privacy International Profile picture
Aug 5
BREAKING: Nearly 4 years after our complaint and 2 after starting their investigation, the French data protection authority CNIL finds breaches in Criteo's activities, and proposes a fine of €60 million.

Why did this happen and why does it matter? 👇 privacyinternational.org/advocacy/2426/…
Criteo is an online advertising platform claiming to have captured the "identity and interest data" of 72% of all internet users, building "the world's largest open shopper data set", allowing them to "precisely predict what inspires shoppers and drive higher engagement"
They spy on people's online browsing behaviour to try and predict their propensity to engage with specific products, and the types of ad design they would best respond to.

In short, it's a manipulation machine.
Read 9 tweets
Privacy International Profile picture
Aug 3
In October 2021, Meta announced that they were acquiring Within, a company that offers immersive VR fitness service.

A few days ago the FTC announced that they would seek to block this acquisition.

But how did we get there? Why does it matter? 🤔

ftc.gov/news-events/ne…
Meta (then Facebook) got into VR (Virtual Reality) in 2014 when they acquired headset manufacturer Oculus.

Since then its VR division keeps expending. Acquiring companies producing the most successful apps on its store, such as Beat Saber.

roadtovr.com/facebook-bigbo…
Meta's strategy is pretty clear, buy competitors to ensure complete dominance over the VR space.

This is not an isolated behaviour among Big Tech. Google is doing the same thing. See our fight to prevent their acquisition of Fitbit👇

privacyinternational.org/campaigns/goog…
Read 7 tweets
Privacy International Profile picture
Jul 26
🧵 It’s been a month since the U.S. Supreme Court made an unprecedented decision to rip away existing constitutional protections around the right to access safe abortion care. 1/4
In light of this, we have published a response - emphasising that the human right to privacy encompasses reproductive autonomy, and the right to access safe abortion care.

The Dobbs decision is an outlier. It is goes against the bulk of international human rights standards. 2/4
We will not stop fighting for the right to privacy and reproductive autonomy.

We will fight to ensure that the right to privacy is wide enough to protect every person’s inherent dignity from interferences which bear upon the core of their personhood. 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Privacy International Profile picture
Jul 26
Another story on companies you’ve never heard of secretly amassing as much data as they can on you, and unscrupulously selling it to the highest bidder. In this case law enforcement agencies
👇
theverge.com/2022/7/18/2326…
Venntel, one of the companies mentioned in the piece, and in our research, has claimed to collect location data from more than 250 million mobile devices and process over 15 billion location data points per day 🤯
The current adtech ecossystem drives and allowing companies to have such dodgy practices.
Read 4 tweets
Privacy International Profile picture
Jul 26
🧵New: @Disclose_ngo @derspiegel got access to documents that shows the EU provided Marocco with mobile phone extraction and other hacking tools, with the objective of fighting irregular immigration and human trafficking.

disclose.ngo/fr/article/uni…
The investigation mentions our work on the EU Agency for Law Enforcement Training: in 2020, we discovered CEPOL was facilitating trainings in non-EU countries in surveillance techniques prone for abuse, which lack safeguards in EU member states themselves. privacyinternational.org/long-read/4289…
This is not an isolated case: the European Union and other countries have been transferring technology and practices to governments and agencies around the world, in the form of equipment, trainings, facilitating exports or even promoting legislation.

Read 5 tweets
Privacy International Profile picture
Jul 26
We’re in Court this week with @libertyhq, challenging MI5 for breaching surveillance laws for a decade, and providing false info to unlawfully obtain bulk surveillance warrants against public. 🤯

But what does that actually mean? 🧵
In 2019, it came to light that MI5 wasn’t implementing some really important legal safeguards which apply to them.

These safeguards - which include limits on how long personal data is kept and who has access - were put in place to prevent abuses of power.
Internal documents show that MI5 knew about these issues for years before informing oversight bodies, and that they had a ‘limited’ understanding of what data was held in specific systems, and, in some instances they couldn’t even properly search it. 😬
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(