TikTok Bans Miss the Point, But Are Still Great News for Privacy
Privacy concerns about the social media platform TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, are not new. We've been reporting on them on the PIA blog for several years. More…
Governments
UK Government Is Engaged in Large-Scale Surveillance of Social Media
New US And EU Laws Bring Risks To Privacy The UK civil rights group Big Brother Watch has published a major new document about the UK government's surveillance of social…
EU to Use ePrivacy and GDPR to Tackle Illegal Cookie Walls
One of the biggest criticisms of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is that it has led to a plague of annoying pop-ups and Web pages requesting permission to…
Meta’s Lawsuit Against NSO Goes Forward – The Fight Against NSO Spyware Gains Strength
The murky world of government spyware has never been the same after the Pegasus Project leaked in July 2021 a list of over 50,000 phone numbers believed to be people…
Meta’s Tracking Woes Confirmed As It Intensifies Its Battle For Control Of The EU’s GDPR
In December 2022, we discussed the leak of an important ruling by EU privacy regulators regarding Meta's micro-targeted advertising, a system entirely based on constant online surveillance. The two parts…
Will GDPR’s Win Against Facebook Change Advertising?
We've just written about the mounting problems for Facebook and its parent company Meta. And to that list of issues can be added another one, potentially the biggest so far,…
Politicians Still Underestimate Smart Cars’ Threat to Privacy
It was three years ago that we blog wrote about the privacy problems raised by "smartphones on wheels" – the fact that today's vehicles contain powerful computer systems and a…
Real-Time Bidding is Bad for Privacy and Promotes Disinformation
The PIA blog spends a lot of time discussing advertising, which might seem strange. But the sad fact is that today's online advertising model represents the most serious continuing assault…
Special Advisor to CJEU Confirms It’s a VPN’s World
For what is probably the first time, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU's top court, is considering a case about the use of VPNs. When…
The EU Is Tackling a Serious Problem with the Wrong Approach: Real-Time Mass Surveillance
One of the most serious new threats to online privacy is currently working its way through the European Union's legislative system. No decent person can be against a regulation "laying…