mass surveillance
French parliament votes for biometric surveillance at Paris Olympics
European Union lawmakers are on track to ban the use of remote biometric surveillance for general law enforcement purposes. However that hasn’t stopped parliamentarians in France voting to deploy AI…
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A huge Chinese database of faces and vehicle license plates spilled online
A massive Chinese database storing millions of faces and vehicle license plates was left exposed on the internet for months before it quietly disappeared in August. While its contents might seem unremarkable for China, where facial recognition is routine and state surveillance is ubiquitous, the sheer size of the exposed…
Selfie scraping Clearview AI hit with another €20M ban order in Europe
Clearview AI has been hit with another sanction for breaching European privacy rules. The Athens-based Hellenic data protection authority has fined the controversial facial recognition firm €20 million and banned…
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India’s farmers exposed by new Aadhaar data leak
A security researcher said an Indian government website was exposing the Aadhaar numbers of India’s farmers, potentially amounting to millions of people. Atul Nair told TechCrunch that he found a part of the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi website that was revealing the farmers’ information. PM-Kisan, as the agency is…
Clearview AI banned from selling its facial recognition software to most US companies
A company that gained notoriety for selling access to billions of facial photos, many culled from social media without the knowledge of the individuals depicted, faces major new restrictions to…
EU-US trans-Atlantic data transfers ‘deal in principle’ faces tough legal review
The political agreement reached late last month between the European Union and the United States on a new trans-Atlantic data transfers pact, which aims to end years of legal uncertainty…
The European Parliament has definitively backed major limits on behavioral advertising during a plenary vote on amendments to the pan-EU Digital Services Act (DSA). The move looks set to crank…
Over 30 civil society organizations, pro-privacy tech businesses and European startups are making a last-ditch pitch to try to convince EU lawmakers to put stricter limits on surveillance advertising as…
Adviser to EU’s top court suggests German bulk data retention law isn’t legal
The battle between the appetites of European Union Member States’ governments to retain their citizens’ data — for fuzzy, catch-all “security” purposes — and the region’s top court, the CJEU,…
Clearview AI told it broke Australia’s privacy law, ordered to delete data
After Canada, now Australia has found that controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI, broke national privacy laws when it covertly collected citizens’ facial biometrics and incorporated them into its AI-powered…
Watch Edward Snowden launch Global Encryption Day, live today
Marginalized communities, survivors of abuse, politicians, law enforcement — they all use encrypted communications to keep their information safe. But the encryption of the kinds of services you and I…
European Parliament backs ban on remote biometric surveillance
The European Parliament has voted to back a total ban on biometric mass surveillance. AI-powered remote surveillance technologies such as facial recognition have huge implications for fundamental rights and freedoms…
20 years later, unchecked data collection is part of 9/11’s legacy
Twenty years from now, will we look back on this decade as a turning point in protecting and upholding individuals’ right to privacy, or will we still be saying, “Never…
Evernote quietly disappeared from an anti-surveillance lobbying group’s website
In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users’ data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked…
The highest chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has delivered a blow to anti-surveillance campaigners in Europe by failing to find that bulk interception of digital comms…
If you don’t want robotic dogs patrolling the streets, consider CCOPS legislation
Community control over police surveillance laws promote transparency and protect civil rights and liberties with respect to surveillance technology. To date, just 19 U.S. cities have passed such laws.
New privacy bill would end law enforcement practice of buying data from brokers
A new bill known as the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would seal up a loophole that intelligence and law enforcement agencies use to obtain troves of sensitive…
MEPs call for European AI rules to ban biometric surveillance in public
A cross-party group of 40 MEPs in the European parliament has called on the Commission to strengthen an incoming legislative proposal on artificial intelligence to include an outright ban on…
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How Jamaica failed to handle its JamCOVID scandal
Amber Group claimed it faced “cyberattacks, hacking and mischievous players.” In reality, the app was just not that secure.
Controversial facial recognition startup Clearview AI violated Canadian privacy laws when it collected photos of Canadians without their knowledge or permission, the country’s top privacy watchdog has ruled. The New…
Facebook’s EU-US data transfers face their final countdown
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has agreed to swiftly finalize a long-standing complaint against Facebook’s international data transfers which could force the tech giant to suspend data flows from the…
California’s CA Notify app to offer statewide exposure notification using Apple and Google’s framework
The state of California has now expanded access of its CA Notify app to all in the state, after originally deploying the app in a pilot program at UC Berkeley…
Australia’s spy agencies caught collecting COVID-19 app data
Australia’s intelligence agencies have been caught “incidentally” collecting data from the country’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app during the first six months of its launch, a government watchdog has found. The report,…
Europe’s top court confirms no mass surveillance without limits
Europe’s top court has delivered another slap-down to indiscriminate government mass surveillance regimes. In a ruling today the CJEU has made it clear that national security concerns do not exclude…
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How the NSA is disrupting foreign hackers targeting COVID-19 vaccine research
The headlines aren’t always kind to the National Security Agency, a spy agency that operates almost entirely in the shadows. But a year ago, the NSA launched its new Cybersecurity Directorate, which in the past year has emerged as one of the more visible divisions of the spy agency. At…
NSA call records collection ruled illegal by US appeals court
A program run by the National Security Agency that collected details on billions of Americans’ phone calls was ruled illegal by a U.S. appeals court on Thursday. The Ninth Circuit…
Apple launches COVID-19 ‘Exposure Notification Express’ with iOS 13.7 — Android to follow later this month
Apple and Google are continuing to make good on their planned roll-out of exposure notification technology for helping with COVID-19 contact-tracing efforts. The two partners are introducing new tools that…
Leaked S-1 says Palantir would fight an order demanding its encryption keys
Palantir, the secretive data analytics startup founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, would challenge a government order seeking the company’s encryption keys, according to a leaked document. TechCrunch has obtained…
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Fearing coronavirus, a Michigan college is tracking its students with a flawed app
Schools and universities across the United States are split on whether to open for the fall semester, thanks to the ongoing pandemic. Albion College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan, said in June it would allow its nearly 1,500 students to return to campus for the new academic year…
With the launch of Android 11 getting closer, Google today launched the third and final beta of its mobile operating system ahead of its general availability. Google had previously delayed…
