The Database: Collecting the world's financial data

We investigate how some private companies use personal financial information and the human impact this has.

What do you do if your bank account suddenly gets closed and you and your business can no longer function - and you have no idea why?

You discover it is because you are on a database that you did not even know existed, saying that you have links with "terrorism" and therefore few banks will deal with you.

This happened to two organisations in London which were listed on a database used by the banking system to combat money laundering and other financial crimes.

AI and our health data: A pandemic threat to our privacy

The coronavirus pandemic gives big tech firms a chance to access the holy grail of datasets - medical records.

AI and our health data: A pandemic threat to our privacy

Put yourself in the shoes of the NHS, the United Kingdom's tax-payer funded public health service. You treat about a million patients every 36 hours and that is pre-pandemic. The amount of health data you are now churning out is enormous - and you want to harness that data in the fight against COVID-19.

So you turn to the private sector and get technology companies to help you do that. Seems to make sense, but here is the issue: Companies with chequered histories over data handling start landing those contracts. And, to date, the British government has refused to disclose the contractual terms

New technology: Are we trading our privacy for convenience? | The Bottom Line

How the same devices we happily carry in our pockets are being weaponised against us.

It is the age-old debate that accompanies all new advancements in technology: We love to adopt the latest tech, and we do not think too much about the consequences for our safety and privacy.

Facial recognition is great to unlock a phone, but it is also being used by security agencies to pick us out of the crowd.

The internet still holds the promise to make our lives easier and knowledge more accessible. But it comes with the price of selling ourselves to "surveillance capitalism".

Going incognito with VPNs in the age of surveillance

A look at why the market for Virtual Private Networks has expanded, enabling users to spread and access information.

Virtual Private Networks first came into use in 1996 and are among the most enduring innovations in online browsing with popularity on the rise around the world.

VPNs were originally developed as tools for corporations and governments to connect their offices in different countries, to make it easier for people to work together.

But as surveillance and control of the web have increased, a market has emerged and expanded - for people to work around internet blocks and to hide their location online.

Amazon, Jeff Bezos and collecting data | DW Documentary

Amazon is a machine that can simultaneously observe, compare and analyze more than 300 million people worldwide. The company is not just a marketplace, market supervisor and provider of more and more services and consumer items - it also controls all the data streams in this market and uses them to its own benefit. Who suspects that a single click on an Amazon page will forward information to the company that fills a printed DIN-A-4 page? A conversation with Alexa, watching a streaming offer on Amazon-Prime, ordering vegetables via Amazon-Fresh - all this put together creates a whole library of information about every customer. The group collects everything - it just won’t reveal what conclusions it draws from it. What would be possible if data from other, new business areas were added? In the USA, Amazon is also active in the health and insurance sectors, and police officers are using its facial recognition software to search for wanted persons.

Is China taking social monitoring too far?

Millions of people are punished for alleged bad behaviour under a government monitoring scheme in China.

Millions of Chinese people have been banned from travelling on planes and trains as the government in China expands its social credit programme that ranks people's trustworthiness.

Last year, more than 17 million people with low scores were barred from buying plane tickets, and another five million were not allowed on high-speed trains.

Four million companies have been blacklisted for "untrustworthy conduct" for a number of activities, including bidding for projects, taking part in land auctions and issuing corporate bonds.

The Stasi Project: Solving the World's Biggest Puzzle

In Germany, a small team virtually piece together the history of a surveillance state in the Stasi Puzzle Project.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, employees at the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, frantically tore up hundreds of thousands of incriminating documents containing evidence of how they spied on dissidents and ordinary citizens. But before they could eliminate all evidence of their activities, citizen groups stormed into the Stasi headquarters, blocking its gates with buses and trucks and confiscating what was left of the documents.

To some degree, they were caught off-guard. "I think for a long time, Stasi employees believed that the ministry would continue to exist in another form," explains a member of the Stasi Puzzle Project. "So they didn't think their activities were over."

Lifting the lid on Facebook's surveillance machinery

A whistle-blower revealed how Facebook enabled politicians to exploit personal data. And India's fatal WhatsApp rumours.

The Cambridge Analytica story

2018 was going to be the year Facebook would do things differently. Under intense scrutiny from governments and their regulators over fake news, hate speech and political manipulation on his platform, Mark Zuckerberg vowed to fix things.

Then, last weekend, The New York Times along with the Guardian and Observer and Channel 4 in the UK broke a story that shattered Zuckerberg's PR campaign: Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm employed by US President Donald Trump's election campaign, harvested the personal information of more than 50 million American Facebook users. The goal was to create targeted political advertising to influence voter behaviour.

Confidential: Surveilling Black Lives Matter

Fault Lines investigates the scope and impact of police and FBI surveillance of black activists in the US.

Rodney Barnette grew up in a segregated United States. He was drafted to go to Vietnam at the age of 21 and returned a year later, wounded in the line of duty.

After his return he joined the Black Panther Party, a civil rights movement that demanded an end to police brutality and equal rights to housing and employment. Like many other members of the group, Barnette was unaware that the FBI spied on him for years.

"Despite the fact that my dad had served in Vietnam and he is taking care of his family and is just a regular citizen, this information is being collected because he's considered an enemy by his own government," says his artist daughter Sadie Barnette.

Will right to privacy pose a threat in India?

India's Supreme Court judges say privacy is a fundamental right, but government leaders argued against the claim.

India's Supreme Court ruled that citizens have a constitutional right to privacy in a landmark verdict on Thursday. 

In a setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the ruling could derail a controversial biometric identification programme that the government is pushing on its people.

The verdict may also open the door to legal challenges in a host of other areas, including gay rights, abortion and euthanasia.