On Dec. 26, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his mandate that Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry establish a new set of online rights for citizens. In doing so, Trudeau signaled an intent to overhaul data protection in Canada — a country that since 2004 has had in place the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, a law that has long served as a model for policymakers around the globe as they draft new legislation. Trudeau’s mandate requires enhanced rights for individuals, including rights to transfer their data across platforms; to withdraw, remove and erase basic personal information; to be notified and compensated when breaches occur; and to be protected against online discrimination.

An independent UN investigator has criticised the British government’s decision to host a surveillance company whose technology is allegedly used by repressive regimes to intercept the private messages of journalists and human rights activists.

US hasn't made evidence public but reportedly shared it with UK and Germany.

A secretive start-up promising the next generation of facial recognition software has compiled a database of images far bigger than anything ever constructed by the United States government: over three billion, it says. Is this technology a breakthrough for law enforcement — or the end of privacy as we know it?

Twenty years ago at a Silicon Valley product launch, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy dismissed concern about digital privacy as a red herring: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Around the world, a diverse and growing chorus is calling for the use of smartphone proximity technology to fight COVID-19. In particular, public health experts and others argue that smartphones could provide a solution to an urgent need for rapid, widespread contact tracing—that is, tracking who infected people come in contact with as they move through the world. Proponents of this approach point out that many people already own smartphones, which are frequently used to track users’ movements and interactions in the physical world.

Tracking and tracing patients with mobile phone apps and other electronic devices already has been used in China, South Korea and several other countries

Apple and Google announced a system for tracking the spread of the new coronavirus, allowing users to share data through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transmissions and approved apps from health organizations.

Corporations love to pretend that 'anonymization' of the data they collect protects consumers. Studies keep showing that’s not really true.

New York facial recognition startup Clearview AI – which has amassed a huge database of more than three billion images scraped from employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Venmo – is being sued in a potential class action lawsuit that claims the company gobbled up photos out of “pure greed” to sell to law enforcement.

In an interview with CBS This Morning, Clearview AI's founder says it's his right to collect photos for the facial recognition app.

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

Top Trump ally and consistent encryption scaremonger Senator Lindsey Graham is working on a bill that could coerce tech companies to stop providing end-to-end encryption by threatening them with massive legal liability, The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2019 (or EARN IT Act).

SAN FRANCISCO — In the age of mass digital surveillance, how private should your data and communications be? That question lies at the heart of the encryption panel that kicked off the Enigma Conference here yesterday (Jan. 27).

On 15 January, Advocate General (AG) Campos Sánchez-Bordona of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered his opinions on four cases regarding data retention regimes in France, Belgium and the UK, in the context of these Members States’ surveillance programmes.

Government use of face surveillance technology chills free speech, threatens residents’ privacy, and amplifies historical bias in our criminal system.

Amazon, Alphabet, Alibaba, Facebook, Tencent - five of the world's 10 most valuable companies, all less than 25 years old - and all got rich, in their own ways, on data.

More than 267 million Facebook user phone numbers, names and user IDs were exposed in a database that anyone could access online, adding to a long list of privacy and security mishaps that continue to plague the world's largest social network.