Nothing New as UK Continues to Spy on Citizens

November 27, 2017

People in the United States appear to always be up in arms about their civil liberties.  While it can be annoying, this is a good thing because it shows that citizens are trying to keep their government in check. The United States pales in comparison to the United Kingdom when it comes to defying civil liberties and spying on citizens.  TechCrunch shares the article, “UK Spies Using Social Media Data For Das Surveillance.”

Why does it come as a surprise that governments are using social media to collect information on their citizens? Many social media users do not have filters, including the US President Trump, and post everything online.  Governments take advantage of this, so it only makes sense when Privacy International says they have evidence that UK spy agencies use social media to gather information on suspects.

What does come as interesting is that the evidence shows that UK agencies shared their information databases with foreign governments and law enforcement?  On the other hand, given that the UK has been a target for terrorist attacks, this makes sense. Privacy International is challenging UK’s intelligence use of the of the personal data as an investigation tool.  This is the biggest concern and rightly so:

A key concern of the committee at the time was that rules governing use of the datasets had not been defined in legislation (although the UK government has since passed a new investigatory powers framework that enshrines various state surveillance bulk powers in law).  But at the time of the report, privacy issues and other safeguards pertaining to BPDs had not been considered in public or parliament.

There are not any legal ramifications if the data is misused.  This is a big deal and there need to be penalties if the data is used in harmful ways.  It begs the question, however, what about financial and retail industries that collect data on customers to sell more products?  Is that akin to this?  Also, people need to put less of their lives online and they would have less to worry about.

Whitney Grace, November 27, 2017

Comments

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