On 8 January 2020, Privacy International issued an open letter to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet Inc., asking Google to “take action against exploitative pre-installed software on Android devices.” The letter is both a caution and a call to action against exploitation of smartphone users by manufacturers who put profit over privacy by pre-installing apps, known as “bloatware”, on low-cost devices. The campaign on privacy safeguards for users of low-cost technolog...
Dear Mr. Pichai, We, the undersigned, agree with you: privacy cannot be a luxury offered only to those people who can afford it. And yet, Android Partners – who use the Android trademark and branding – are manufacturing devices that contain pre-installed apps that cannot be deleted (often known as "bloatware"), which can leave users vulnerable to their data being collected, shared and exposed without their knowledge or consent. These phones carry the "Google Play Protect" branding, but re...
Together with Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and 70 human rights organisations, APC signed a joint letter to Google's CEO Sundar Pichai concerning Google's plans to launch a censored search engine in China ahead of his testimony before US Congress on 11 December. The project, code-named Dragonfly, is reportedly in development and would be designed to meet the censorship requir...
To: Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer, Google Inc cc: Ben Gomes, Vice President of Search; Kent Walker, Senior Vice President of Global Affairs; Scott Beaumont, Vice President, Greater China and Korea 11 December 2018 Dear Mr. Pichai, We are writing to ask you to ensure that Google drops Project Dragonfly and any plans to launch a censored search app in China, and to re-affirm the compan...
This report by 7amleh – Arab Center for Social Media Advancement reveals new insights about how Google Maps’ mapping process in the occupied Palestinian territories serves the interests of the Israeli government and contradicts Google’s commitment to international human rights frameworks. In particular it focuses on Google Maps’ representation of geography and political boundaries in Is...
The rapid growth in internet access and use in Africa, particularly through the mobile internet, makes it imperative for civil society and for internet companies committed to the free flow of information and freedom of expression to better understand how intermediary liability works (or does not work). This paper looks at the role of internet intermediaries as well as their limitations on enabl...
Intermediary liability refers to when internet intermediaries involved in the transmission processing or storage of electronic data across on the internet are held liable for unlawful content transmitted or stored on their networks. Sometimes intermediaries may find themselves legally liable for content on their networks created by third parties, including content which they did not even know ...
Currently, state of intermediary liability in Sub-Saharan Africa is not very clear, although there is a lot of anecdotal evidence of governments asking service providers to remove content, or block services such as SMS. Reports from five African countries: Kenya and Uganda in East Africa, South Africa in Southern Africa and Nigeria and Senegal in West Africa establish establish whether intermed...
The rapid growth in internet access and use in Africa, particularly through the mobile internet, makes it imperative for civil society and for internet companies committed to the free flow of information and freedom of expression to better understand how intermediary liability works (or does not work). This paper looks at the role of internet intermediaries as well as their limitations on enabl...
The rapid growth in internet access and use in Africa, particularly through the mobile internet, makes it imperative for civil society and for internet companies committed to the free flow of information and freedom of expression to better understand how intermediary liability works (or does not work). This paper looks at issues around intermediary liability and the legal and institutional envi...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2019
Unless otherwise stated, content on the APC website is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)