Privacy International

05/10/2026

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Following the publication of our Technology, Data and Elections Checklist, we have created a deck of

01/10/2026

As part of the Human Rights Council 63rd session, tomorrow we'll be participating in a hybrid side event to launch new guidelines - developed together with United Nations Human Rights and The Carter Center on the use of digital technologies in electoral processes. Register to attend: https://indico.un.org/event/1026002/

The guidance is for states, businesses and political actors on the human rights compliant use of technologies throughout the electoral cycle. It considers human rights relevant to electoral processes, outlining their legally binding content, and highlights the responsibilities of businesses and states to protect human rights from third-party violations.

We also make recommendations on the operationalisation of international human rights standards with respect to digital technologies for the purposes of voter registration, identification and authentication; the use of biometric data; the procurement of businesses in the election cycle; the use of personal information during electoral processes; the proliferation of microtargeting for political advertising; and the rise in disinformation and hate speech.

Learn more: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5867/human-rights-standards-and-guidelines-use-digital-technologies-electoral-processes

01/10/2026

Data plays a key role in war and conflict. As military systems seep into law enforcement, border control, public health, and education, what should be a clear distinction between national defence and domestic governance is collapsing.

This is the next great challenge for the protection of our privacy. Learn more:

There’s a revolution occurring in how war and conflict are waged. New data-intensive systems are being developed; battlefields are testing grounds for a new generation of tech; and commercial tech infrastructure is now supporting military operations.

30/09/2026

We are deeply concerned by the results of the British Transport Police's live FRT trial. It reaffirms how invasive and disproportionate live facial recognition tech is and why it shouldn't be permitted. Thousands of people have their highly sensitive facial data processed in public spaces as they go about their daily lives, sometimes unknowingly. It also undermines claims of it being a targeted measure.

What's further concerning is that they continue to extend these deployments when there is no specific legal framework in place to regulate facial recognition, which is essential to ensure there are restrictions and safeguards on its use to protect people's rights.

British Transport Police’s six-month facial recognition pilot produced one alert, and it was a false positive

29/09/2026

Governments all over the world have been building up robust arsenals of technology to surveil and monitor migrants and asylum seekers at the border and within the country. We conducted a global survey to map the various technologies reportedly used on people on the move, from mobile phone extraction to facial recognition technology.

For each individual technology, we break down:
- How it works
- What rights are impacted (and what rights the subject has)
- What corporations are involved in the development or procurement of the technology
- Case studies of usage across the world

This is only a launchpad we're hoping can start a larger conversation among fellow advocates and migrants' rights defenders on technology weaponised for harmful uses -- technological capabilities are going to be increasingly advanced and developed, and its unchecked use against migrants and asylum seekers increasingly normalised if we don't scrutinise it.

Governments around the world are building increasingly sophisticated surveillance infrastructures to monitor migrants, asylum seekers and refugees at borders and within countries.

25/09/2026

Data protection law is built on the assumption that organisations understand their own data processing — what they collect, why, and what happens to it.

AI increasingly breaks that assumption, from opaque "black box" processing to systems that generate new personal data through inference.

Privacy International has responded to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology's call for evidence on data regulation in the age of AI.

We set out where the UK's data protection framework still holds up, where AI is straining core rights like access, rectification and erasure, and where the law has failed to keep pace — including recent changes to automated decision-making and a longstanding oversight gap around intelligence services' data breaches.

Our submission covers the following topics, following the government's call for evidence:

24/09/2026

The UK is launching a new Royal Air Force space squadron as the inaugural UK Space Power Conference gets underway.

Another reminder that the new space race is increasingly also a military one.

Our analysis: The new space race is already a war race

Satellites are strategic assets at the heart of global power. We have heard the story before: the moon race, the space race, the promise of progress framed as the conquest of territories beyond Earth.

23/09/2026

Defence-driven systems are seeping into everyday life. These systems can enable surveillance, data collection, and amplified biases. What happens when this tech shapes our town squares? Learn more:

We are at a war footing as we enter an era where the tech world is increasingly defined by conflict. Innovation has never been driven solely by social needs, market forces or the common good.

23/09/2026

There's a quiet trade we make every time we buy into a company's ecosystem: convenience now, dependency later.

The groupchat we rely on, the purchases we've made, the habits we've formed can, in many cases, become a reason to stay with one particular company - even when they stop being the best option.

Being able to have these things work across platforms is called interoperability. But it's a difficult policy problem. Opening a system up to competitors can also open it up to new risks, particularly where encryption and trust between users are involved.

We're working out how to do it right:

Technology giants like Apple, Meta, Google, and Microsoft spend billions of dollars to keep you in their walled gardens. The more data that is kept within one ecosystem, the harder it is to move to another, and the more challenging it is for an upstart to break into the fray

22/09/2026

Period tracking apps have become a key part of managing our reproductive health. Our research examines the potential risks they pose for the privacy of our intimate reproductive health data.

We investigated some of the most popular period tracking apps using our in-house technical tool to analyse how these apps function and process a user's period data. Our findings were rather worrying.

In the context of a global roll back on reproductive rights, we urge menstruation apps to ensure they take a privacy-by-design approach to give users full transparency and control of their reproductive health data to protect their privacy. Read more about our research here:

Many menstruating individuals today use period-tracking apps as a convenient digital tool on their smart phone to track their menstruation. In the UK, researchers have found that more women are using smartphone apps to track their menstrual cycles for fertility-tracking purposes. In the U.S., the ov...