Data Privacy Day
January 28th is Data Privacy Day. So where’s our privacy?
Digital privacy is so 20th Century.
- Canada is directly tapping internet filesharing traffic, even though they are prohibited by law from spying on Canadians.
- The USA PATRIOT Act Section 215 allows collection of data as long as it is “relevant … to an authorized investigation”. Leaked documents revealed that the NSA interprets this to include every single phone call made from major US phone companies.
- Fifty million people downloaded an Android flashlight app which tracked the user’s GPS location and other data, and sent the data back to the app’s publisher.
- Britain’s Home Secretary Theresa May attempted to introduce the Draft Communications Data Bill, requiring companies to record information on their customers which could be accessed by the government without individual warrant. After the law failed to pass, several British lords tried to sneak the bill into law as an amendment to an unrelated counter-terrorism bill.
- Facebook’s convenient “Login with Facebook” system offers sites massive amounts of your private data, including the private data of your friends without their permission. Facebook stopped offering this much data to apps created after April 2014, but plenty more sites offer user data.
- Britain announced plans in 2006 to upload everyone’s medical information to a central national database. In 2013, that information was put on sale, including to private companies in other countries, ignoring moral protections for doctor-patient confidentiality.
- Britain celebrated the year 2000 with the RIPA, surveillance act. Originally argued as necessary to fight terrorism, RIPA surveillance is currently used to catch people watching TV without a license. RIPA also allows mass surveillance, the use of secret warrants which are immune to being revealed in court, forces ISPs to fit surveillance equipment, allows wiretaps to “safeguard the economic well-being of the United Kingdom”, allows the police to conduct intrusive surveillance like bugging homes, and authorises non-law enforcement agencies such as local councils to obtain communications metadata, hire informers and conduct in-person surveillance without a warrant. When the European Union ruled this law illegal, Theresa May rushed through the DRIP Act to make it legal again.
- Florida police deployed cellphone Stingrays without a warrant more than 200 times in four years without a warrant. These devices can track cellphones and intercept calls, and their use without a warrant was ruled unconstitutional in 2014.
- The NSA literally hacked into Google and Yahoo by tapping the private data links between their server facilities and siphoning out millions of records of user data per day. Ostensibly to prevent terrorism, the the NSA is known to feed intelligence to other law enforcement agencies.
- In 2013, LG Smart TVs were found to be sending data back to the manufacturer, including a list of everything the viewer watched. Data was sent unencrypted over the Internet and the option to disable this “feature” did not actually disable it.
Happy Data Privacy Day, everyone.