privacy

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 “b...

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 expos...

Following a seven-year, windy journey, on 8 November 2019, Kenya got a data protection law. The Data Protection Act, 2019 has various positive elements and can go a long way in addressing the live issues in protecting the privacy of data in Kenya. The law came at a time of widespread concern about privacy in the country, including the fragmented oversight over privacy and data protection; incre...

A damning new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, raises alarm about the rise of the digital welfare state, which uses data and technologies to automate, predict, identify, surveil, detect, target and punish the poor. The report, recently presented to the UN General Assembly, covers a range of uses of digital technologies for wel...

Last week it was revealed that the governments of the US, UK and Australia are pressuring Facebook to "not proceed with its plan to implement end-to-end encryption across its messaging services without ensuring that there is no reduction to user safety and without including a means for lawful access to the content of communications to protect our citizens." APC joined over a hundred civil socie...

Dear Mr. Zuckerberg, The organizations below write today to encourage you, in no uncertain terms, to continue increasing the end-to-end security across Facebook’s messaging services. We have seen requests from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australian governments asking you to suspend these plans “until [Facebook] can guarantee the added privacy does not reduce public safety”. We ...

The Council reaffirmed that reprisals can never be justified. Council members rejected attempts to weaken the text including deleting the references to the roles of the Assistant Secretary-General and the Human Rights Council Presidents. The resolution listed key trends such as the patterns of reprisals, increasing self-censorship, the use of national security arguments and counter-terrorism st...

Does technological progress support or hinder the human rights of women and gender diverse people? And what about their privacy rights? On the one hand, the right to privacy protects online spaces where people can securely navigate their sexual and gender identity. Yet, on the other hand, privacy has historically been considered a tool to control sexuality and gender identities by patriarc...