Children Disagree with Chat Control: They Want Privacy, Not Surveillance
One of the laziest justifications for more surveillance is that we must “think of the children,” i.e. it is acceptable to reduce or even abolish privacy in some contexts in…
Surveillance
Meta Hit With 1.2 Billion Euros Fine For Violating the GDPR – Time It Adopted a Federated Approach
Meta has been ordered to pay a fine of 1.2 billion euros (around $1.3 billion) for violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by sending personal data of EU…
How the World’s Leading Academic Publishers Became Surveillance Publishers
We've written on PIA blog about the rising use of workplace surveillance to keep tabs on what people are doing in offices and elsewhere. But that’s nothing compared to what…
Privacy-Invasive Proctoring Software Declared Unconstitutional by US Court
During the Covid-19 pandemic we avoided most forms of person-to-person interaction unless absolutely necessary. That was deeply problematic for education, which is based on the idea of a teacher interacting…
What Do Iran’s Theocrats and Tesla Vehicles Have in Common? The Use of High-Tech Surveillance Cameras
Digital technology is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes vital tools like VPNs possible, providing strong and affordable privacy protection for personal data when in transit across…
AI-Based Chat is Coming for Your Privacy: Should We Pause Development of Large Language Models?
Back in February, we noted on PIA blog that the growing excitement about large language models (LLMs), for example in the form of ChatGPT, overlooked the serious privacy dangers they…
Meta’s Tracking Pixel Violates GDPR and the EU Ban on Transatlantic Data Transfers
One of the most insidious forms of surveillance carried out routinely by web sites and their advertisers involves tracking pixels. These are graphic elements that are just one pixel in…
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…
We Need Privacy Laws for the Metaverse and We Need Them Now
Back in December 2021, we discussed the potential privacy risks of the metaverse on the PIA blog, the current term for what used to be called virtual reality. It might…
Why Smart Speaker Privacy Might Be the Next Big Data Collection Scandal
It was over five years ago that we first warned about an imminent invasion of “listening, eavesdropping, spying things” in the form of so-called “smart” speakers. The cosy term “smart”…