🚨 NEW: Freedom of Information (FOI) requests reveal that the UK passport and immigration databases - with over 150 million photos - are being increasingly used by police for mass facial recognition searches without a clear legal basis, or the public or Parliament’s knowledge. We and @BigBrotherWatch demand the Home Office implement an urgent moratorium on the use of the passport and immigration databases for the purpose of FRT searches.

🚨 BREAKING 🚨
The UK government’s policy of GPS tagging asylum seekers arriving in the UK has been found UNLAWFUL, in a powerful decision by the data protection regulator, @ICOnews.

This is huge. 🧵
ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/…
@ICOnews Since Jan 2021, the Home Office has been GPS ankle tagging migrants, subjecting them to 24/7 surveillance.

This policy was expanded to people arriving on small boats in 2022, in spite of efficacy, well-being and human rights concerns.

As Member States begin to negotiate the #PandemicTreaty @WHO (apps.who.int/gb/inb/e/e_inb…), PI made recommendations to strengthen the zero draft 👇privacyinternational.org/advocacy/5035/…
🧵 1/5 @WHO PI welcomes the inclusion of a provision in the #PandemicTreaty on confidentiality and privacy to reflect the role of data protection in any effective, modern public health policies. 2/5

Yesterday we attended a hearing at the CNIL (the French data protection authority) following our 2020 complaint against @doctissimo, a major French health and wellness information website. Some spicy details, including a proposed €380,000 fine...

Thread 👇 @doctissimo The CNIL rapporteure focused on 5 points: data retention, consent, joint controllership, security and cookies - it found that Doctissimo failed on all of them when collecting and sharing the sensitive data of thousands of people.

💥 NEWS! In a landmark ruling, the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal found “very serious failings” by MI5 breaching the right to privacy from at least 2016, and that successive Home Secretaries didn't enquire into & resolve this rule breaking, despite the red flags 🚩

🧵👇 We began this legal case in January 2020 with @libertyhq & welcome today’s ruling after arguing that MI5 unlawfully held and used individuals’ personal data, gathered in secret, in breach of key legal safeguards.

🧵
1. NEW PI REPORT! "SECURING PRIVACY: PI ON END-TO-END ENCRYPTION"!

PI believes E2EE of your communications is core to your privacy, security and freedoms in the digital age.

privacyinternational.org/report/4949/se… 2. E2EE benefits us all, giving us all private spaces to think, explore and talk, without governments, corporations and criminals being able to spy on what we're saying.

‼️NEWS‼️ Today we file complaints against the GPS tagging of migrants in the UK. We’re asking the Information Commissioner (ICO) & Forensic Science Regulator (FSR) to take action against this inhumane and degrading policy & practice by the Home Office.

Read 🧵 to find out more: GPS ankle tags monitor a person’s precise location 24/7, generating a huge amount of sensitive and granular “trail data”, stored for years.

This provides deep insight into and reveals intimate details of an individual’s life.

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"

🆕 @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🧵

https://twitter.com/NicolaKelly/status/1555420282986369024

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…

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…

🧵 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

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 🤯

🧵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…

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.

There's been a lot of discussion about the ways in which your personal data can be used to curtail the exercise of your reproductive rights.

In our latest piece, we highlight our research on privacy and reproductive rights in a post-Roe world 🧵

privacyinternational.org/long-read/4937… A lot of this conversation has been dominated by period-tracking apps. There's a good reason for this: as our research has shown, they collect a lot of personal data.

But they're not the only actors we should be scrutinising. 2/8

privacyinternational.org/long-read/4316…

A month after the US Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in its reversal of #RoevWade, we reflect on its implications from an international human rights law and privacy perspective.

In short, the decision makes the US an outlier 🧵

privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/… SCOTUS was clear that it did not consider that access to safe abortion care engaged the right to privacy.

However, courts around the world and UN treaty bodies have repeatedly stated the opposite.

❗️Latest leaked documents reveal that Bristol council staff have used social media to surveil parents critical of local SEND (special education needs and disability) provision.

bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-n… Two years ago, we released our groundbreaking research highlighting the use of social media monitoring by Local Authorities.

privacyinternational.org/report/3584/wh…

⚠️ NEWS - The @CMAgovUK directed #Facebook to sell #Giphy citing risks over users'data privacyinternational.org/press-release/… #Facebook could require "TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat to provide more user data in order to access Giphy GIFs” said @CMAgovUK

ICYMI: The ICO has announced their provisional intent to fine Clearview AI £17 million after our complaint with @NOYBeu, @HermesCenter and @Homo_Digitalis_ in May 🎉

https://twitter.com/privacyint/status/1465400240413069319

Have you heard of Clearview AI before?

1/ Major victory.. the UK data regulator (ICO) has just provisionally fined Clearview AI £17 million. Wanna know why? 2/ Clearview AI is in the business of collecting faces online, storing them in a searchable database of now 10 billion+ faces, and reportedly selling access to that database to the police (and previously private companies). nytimes.com/2020/01/18/tec…

Pakistan's ID system NADRA is yet another eye-opening example of how ID systems can be exclusionary by design, specially when adherence is made compulsory & when such systems are used as gatekeepers to access a wide range of essential goods + services.

👉 privacyinternational.org/node/4656 But what could go wrong when socio-cultural patriarchal expectations are hard-coded into a one-size fits all foundational digital ID system? And what happens to those that don't fit the standard on the eyes of the state?

privacyinternational.org/node/4472/