Since our report in August 2021, we find that Apple has eliminated their Chinese political censorship in Taiwan. However, Apple continues to perform broad, keyword-based political censorship outside of mainland China in Hong Kong, despite human rights groups’ recommendations for American companies to resist blocking content.
هذا البعد الرقمي للقمع العابر للحدود – الذي نشير إليه بالقمع الرقمي العابر للحدود – أصبح بسرعة حجر الزاوية للقمع العابر للحدود بشكل يومي، ويشكل تهديدًا لحقوق وحريات المعارضين والنشطاء الذين يعيشون في المنفى.
这份报告阐述了数字化跨国镇压对居住在加拿大的活动家和异见人士有哪些影响。我们的结论是，数字化跨国镇压对这些群体产生了严重影响，包括对他们开展跨国人权宣传工作能力的影响。然而，遭受这种攻击的受害者几乎没有得到任何支持，到目前为止，加拿大政府的政策力度仍显不足。
In this report, we describe how activists and dissidents living in Canada are impacted by digital transnational repression. We conclude that digital transnational repression has a serious impact on these communities, including their ability to undertake transnational advocacy work related to human rights. Yet, there is little support for victims who experience such targeting and policy efforts by the Canadian government to date have been insufficient.
The Information Controls Fellowship Program from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) supports research into how governments in countries, regions, or areas of OTF’s core focus are restricting the free flow of information, cutting access to the open Internet, and implementing censorship mechanisms, thereby threatening the ability of global citizens to exercise basic human rights and democracy; work focused on mitigation of such threats is also supported.
MY2022, an app mandated for use by all attendees of the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing, has a simple but devastating flaw where encryption protecting users’ voice audio and file transfers can be trivially sidestepped. Health customs forms which transmit passport details, demographic information, and medical and travel history are also vulnerable. Server responses can also be spoofed, allowing an attacker to display fake instructions to users.
On August 18, the Citizen Lab published an analysis of Apple product engraving services and observed censorship. In this post, we discuss the significance of the findings with report authors. What has your study of Apple engraving services revealed? We analyzed Apple’s filtering of product engravings in six regions, discovering 1,105 keyword filtering rules used… Read more »
Within mainland China, we found that Apple censors political content including broad references to Chinese leadership and China’s political system, names of dissidents and independent news organizations, and general terms relating to religions, democracy, and human rights. And across all six regions, we found that Apple’s content moderation practices pertaining to derogatory, racist, or sexual content are inconsistently applied and that Apple’s public-facing documents failed to explain how it derives their keyword lists.
Candiru is a secretive Israel-based company that sells spyware exclusively to governments. Using Internet scanning, we identified more than 750 websites linked to Candiru’s spyware infrastructure. We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.
Given our experiences, we have specific recommendations for how any federal commercial privacy legislation must be amended to better protect individuals from the predations and power of private organizations. In making our recommendations we have chosen to focus almost exclusively on the Openness and Transparency, Access to and Amendment of Personal Information, and Whistleblower sections of Bill C-11.
