Press Coverage

30 December 2020, Reuters

From whether governments should use facial recognition for surveillance to what data internet giants should be allowed to collect, 2019 was marked by a heated global debate around privacy and technology.

13 January 2020, BBC News

Star Wars actor Mark Hamill has deleted his Facebook account, lambasting the company's political ads policy. In a tweet, the celebrity accused the firm's chief Mark Zuckerberg of having valued profit over truthfulness.

6 January 2020, CityAM

In the final weeks of 2019, Twitter announced an imminent cull of inactive accounts. Desultory users risked losing their Twitter handles and having to start building their social media presence all over again.

4 January 2020, The Times

Our lives are now ruled by algorithms and apps, our smartphones are as addictive as slot machines. That’s the bad news, says industry whizzkid Tristan Harris. The good news is that Big Tech bosses are taking note. Ben Hoyle reports.

3 January 2020, Washington Post

Iran’s cyber troops long have been among the world’s most capable and aggressive, disrupting banking, hacking oil companies, even trying to take control of a dam from afar, while typically stopping short of the most crippling possible actions, say experts

19 December 2019, Financial Times

The UK government will create a technology regulator next year to police companies such as Facebook and Google after Brexit, according to several people who were involved in the process.

18 December 2019, BBC News

The four most downloaded apps of the decade are all owned by Facebook, according to app tracker App Annie.

18 December 2019, The New York Times

The first iPhone was introduced in 2007; just over a decade later, in 2018, a Pew survey found that 95 percent of teenagers had access to a smartphone, and 45 percent said they were online “almost constantly.”

14 December 2019, Al Jazeera

From Kashmir to Iran, governments are turning off the internet to stop dissent. Plus, the murky world of deepfakes.

13 December 2019, The Telegraph

Pouya Bakhtiari could barely contain his excitement as he sat in gridlocked traffic on the motorway between Tehran and his home city of Karaj.

13 December 2019, BBC News

It was an election in which tens of thousands of targeted adverts from all sorts of organisations reached voters via social media.

13 December 2019, Express and Star

It is perhaps the most surprising development of all during the election campaign that so-called ‘junk news’ is apparently on the decline.

12 December 2019, Financial Times

Sandra Wachter says AI uses sensitive personal traits to target or exclude people in ads

10 December 2019, Financial Times

Authorities are ill-equipped to deal with interference under current rules, warn experts.

10 December 2019, New York Times

Foreign meddling was once the most feared source of online deception before critical elections. Now, some candidates themselves are turning to such manipulative tactics.

9 December 2019, ITV News

So-called ‘junk news’ is on the decline on Twitter but still receives high engagement on Facebook, researchers claim.

6 December 2019, New York Times

Despite Big Tech’s attempts to combat manipulation, companies that sell clicks, likes and followers on social media are easy to find.

5 December 2019, Yahoo

The latest in a long line of privacy scandals happened last week, after Google was found to have been pulling unredacted data from one of America's largest healthcare providers to use in one of its projects.

3 December 2019, The Telegraph

Labour has been told to “come clean” over whether it has helped to spread Russian “disinformation” during the general election campaign.

1 December 2019, Politico

Silicon Valley's efforts to keep bad actors from manipulating next year's election face threats that have evolved since 2016.