In this tech-insight, we look at the role of the Information Commissioner’s Office, and how it can be a source of valuable compliance information and help to businesses.

What Is It?

The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK’s independent, non-departmental public body set up to uphold information rights in the public interest. The ICO also promotes openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals and is the regulator for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, with key responsibilities under the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA) and Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), as well UK GDPR, and other acts. The ICO gives help and advice to individuals and businesses.

Who It Reports To

The ICO reports directly to the Parliament of the United Kingdom and is sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sports, and has physical offices in Wilmslow, Cheshire, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Belfast.

Who?

The current (although outgoing) Information Commissioner is Elizabeth Denham CBE, who was appointed UK Information Commissioner in July 2016. Her previous roles included Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, Canada, and Assistant Privacy Commissioner of Canada. In March 2018, she was named as the most influential person in data-driven business in the updated DataIQ 100 list and, In March 2019, Elizabeth was appointed chair of the Governance Working Group of the International Conference of Information Commissioners (ICIC), a global forum for information commissioners and ombudspersons with 45 members across all continents.

In August this year, it was announced the preferred new UK Information Commissioner is John Edwards who has been New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner since February 2014, and who has practiced law in Wellington, New Zealand, for more than 20 years (specialising in information law).

Like What?

The ICO is the body/regulator responsible for Data protection law advice and information-giving, enforcement, monitoring/audits/studies, recommendations, decisions, and somewhere to complain to for matters like:

– Political campaigning practices (data analytics) e.g., transparency, ethics.

– Charity fundraising practices e.g., compliance laws that protect privacy and prevent nuisance phone calls.

– CCTV systems and facial recognition systems, matters of privacy and compliance with data protection laws.

– Credit and the uses of personal information e.g., by credit reference agencies (CRAs).

– Electoral registration.

– Nuisance marketing calls (enforcing the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 20030). Nuisance calls can be reported to the ICO.

– Spam emails and texts (which can be reported to the ICO).

– Cookies.

– Data protection and journalism.

– Data held by the Police.

– Data protection matters for schools, universities, and colleges.

– Public data access rights.

Advice and Help For Businesses

The ICO provides guides to the legislation, resources, and support for businesses about obligations and how to comply under the Acts. Much of it can be found on the ICO website here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/.

Examples of Action Taken

Part of the role of the ICO is to take action to ensure organisations meet their information rights obligations. Examples of action taken by the ICO can be found on their website here: https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/.

Staying Independent Is Important

The outgoing Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham CBE, has warned (in a recent statement) that in order for the ICO to be able to hold the government to account, it is important that it preserves its independence in a way that is workable, within the context of the framework set by Parliament.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Businesses and organisations must comply with often complicated and changing data protection laws. Although the ICO is responsible for enforcing those laws, its primary role is really to help by giving advice and information, and the website is a useful resource and signposting place for businesses to use and to stay up to date with the latest developments and news. The ICO is also a place for individuals and businesses to complain (perhaps resulting in action with enough complaints) about practices such as spamming (calls, emails, and texts) or not responding to data requests.

The European Parliament has adopted a resolution calling for a ban on the use of AI-based predictive policing systems and the processing of biometric data that leads to mass surveillance.

Areas

The resolution seeks to ban the use of facial recognition technology and AI in several key areas:

– Police use of facial recognition technology in public places.

– Private facial recognition databases (e.g. Clearview AI)

– Predictive policing and social scoring systems.

What Is Clearwater AI?

Clearwater AI is a US-based facial-recognition company started by Australian Hoan Ton-That and a former aide of ex-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The AI-software system, which is used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies, has been criticised for using a database that includes billions of photos scraped from social media websites (possibly in violation of social media platform rules). Concerns have also been voiced that, like other systems, it may have a racial bias.

What Is Predictive Policing?

So-called ‘predictive policing’ tools use algorithms and historic data to predict where certain types of crime (e.g. burglaries and street violence) are likely to occur and to predict the likelihood of known individuals exhibiting certain behaviours or characteristics in the future.

What Are Social Scoring Systems?

An example of a social scoring system can be found in China where the Chinese Communist Party operate a “social credit system” for individuals and organisations. A person’s/organisation’s social score can move up and down depending on their behaviour. Bad behaviour, for example, could include questionable shopping habits, buying too many video games, bad driving, posting on social media, or smoking in non-smoking zones. It has been reported that bad behaviour online, for example, could lead to the punishment of throttling a person’s Internet speed.

What Happens Now?

The European Parliament resolution gives an overview of the argument and indicates the way that voting may go for what will become the AI Act. It is thought that since the AI Act’s lead negotiator, Brando Benifei, and co-negotiators are known to support a blanket ban on facial recognition, there is a strong chance that AI in criminal law and its usage by the police and judicial authorities in criminal matters will have bans and regulations in place soon in the EU.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The case for AI-based facial recognition systems being used in mass surveillance and predictive policing is supposed to help tackle crime in an intelligent, targeted way. The reality (to date) however, has been cases of misidentification, examples of racial bias, strong resistance from freedom groups on matters of privacy, questions about value for money, and questions about ethics. Also, there is a strong feeling that the use and rollout of this technology has happened before the issues have been studied properly and legislation/regulations put in place to offer protection to citizens. Allegations about how Clearwater AI’s database was scraped from social media, as well as worries about the idea of predictive policing and big brother-like social-scoring-systems have all been factors in prompting the need to slow things down and get some rules in place.

After experiencing two outages in a week, one lasting more than six hours, and a whistleblower at a Senate Committee hearing alleging potentially harmful effects from Facebook’s algorithms, some are asking ‘what’s going on with Facebook?’

Whistleblower

Recently identified former Facebook employee turned whistleblower, Frances Haugen, was found to be behind a series of leaks reported in the US Wall Street Journal alleging that Facebook has been putting profit over safety. She added to the points made in the articles by alleging in a recent appearance on popular US TV programme ’60 Minutes’ that there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook.

Allegations

The other reported allegations made by Frances Haugen in newspaper reports and allegations made in the TV interview (which remain unproven) are that Facebook:

– Knew that Instagram was worsening body image issues among teenagers and had a two-tier justice system.

– Uses engagement-based ranking algorithms (in Instagram) knowing that these algorithms can’t adequately identify dangerous content and may even amplify negative content and help to fuel fan violent rhetoric and ethnic violence.

– Hides most of its own data and when asked directly about how it impacts the health and safety of children, it chooses to mislead and misdirect.

– Failed to act on internal research showing that Instagram had a negative impact on the mental health of teenage girls.

– Has repeatedly chosen to optimise displayed content for its own interests (e.g. making more money).

– Has a lack of accountability that may mean that the company continues to make choices that go against the common good.

– Could be likened to tobacco companies (or driving without a seatbelt) because when governments realise it’s harmful, they will take action.

– Prematurely reinstated old algorithms following Joe Biden’s election win, that may have contributed to the 6 January attack on the Capitol Building(s) (i.e. prioritising growth over safety).

– Uses moderation that is mostly focused on English content (nearly 90 per cent), despite most users being non-English speakers.

Senate Sub Committee

Frances Haugen has appeared and testified before a Senate subcommittee on Capitol Hill, repeating the allegations that she believed that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, and weaken the US democracy.

Facebook Says…

It has been reported that last Friday, Facebook’s vice president for policy and global affairs, Nick Clegg, sent a memo to employees outlining what Haugen was likely to say in the 60 minutes program. The company has denied that it encourages bad content and does nothing about it.

Outages

To make matters worse, Facebook has also suffered two damaging outages in a week. The first was a global outage that took down Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Oculus (virtual reality/3D) and was reportedly caused by the backbone connection between data centres shutting down during routine maintenance, causing the DNS servers to go offline. The second (last Friday) lasted around two hours and affected Instagram feeds and Messenger.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The Cambridge Analytica scandal created some huge trust challenges for Facebook, forced them to answer a lot of questions from the government, caused reputational damage, and appeared to make the company work hard and make changes to rebuild trust. Haugen’s allegations, however, (which have been applauded by some as an act of bravery) appear to suggest that this may not be the case and that there are some further significant, meaningful changes to be made in terms of social responsibility and safeguarding issues. Critics, such as Harvard professor and author Shoshana Zuboff, for example, take the view that Haugen’s revelations have shone a light on how big tech companies like Facebook and others operate a kind of surveillance capitalism where our personal experiences are simply used as free raw material for large-scale behavioural data extraction for profit. Facebook and other tech big companies use secret algorithms as part of their daily operations, so total transparency is always going to seem very unlikely. There was also some speculation online that the timing of the outages (when the whistleblower’s allegations were being widely reported) was suspicious but there is no evidence of this. Now that Facebook is so widely used by businesses (Pages, Ads, and WhatsApp particularly), the six-hour outage would have frustrated and annoyed many business customers, thereby generating some more bad publicity among a customer group that is really important to the social media giant. There’s no doubt it’s been an unbelievably bad week for Facebook, bringing to the surface more of the old trust issues, and it is likely that we have some way to go yet before this story returns to the background.

In this feature, we take a look at how a multi-billion-dollar market obtains, uses, and sells our location data.

Report

A GVR report estimates that the global location intelligence market was worth USD 12.2 billion in 2020. This market uses our phone/device location data. There are many different interlinked players in this market ecosystem from app companies, collectors, data aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of whom buy, compile, sell and use our phone location data, ultimately for advertising, analytics, investment strategy, or marketing purposes. The market’s continued growth has been fuelled by factors like the growing penetration of smart devices and portable navigation devices, web-mapping services, as well as the growth of the IoT and the smartphone app market and network infrastructure.

Why and How Is Location Data Collected?

The answers to this question are connected. Examples of some of the main reasons why, and the ways that our location data is collected include:

– Apps are a major source of location data collection. Smartphone apps e.g., those that give directions, weather/meteorological apps (need to give you local weather conditions) need your location data for good reasons i.e., to operate correctly and deliver appropriate results. Also, video-streaming apps need to check user location to decide whether a person is in a country where it’s licensed to stream certain shows. In any case, it is likely that when you install these apps, you will agree to share your location.

– Software Development Kits (SDKs), for example, are tools and code provided by a company to enable and encourage developers to write code for a platform can have built-in location data supply features. For example, Foursquare makes a free SDK which could (potentially) track location through any app that uses it.

What Happens To The Data After Collection?

Apps sell the data to other players in the location intelligence market. This could be anything from third-party companies that specialise in selling location data, or access to it, to advertisers, marketers, and data brokers, other location data providers, and even governments. For example, vox.com (Feb 2021) reported that app trackers secretly sell location data to the government (or/for its agencies) and that Google can’t stop trackers in its apps from selling location data to the (US) government. Examples of where the data is sold after collection by apps includes:

– Data Aggregators, who collect the data from many thousands of different apps, combine it with data from other sources, and sell that data onwards e.g., AdSquare or Cuebiq.

– Data brokers, who buy and sell and sell the data.

– Data analysis companies e.g., Advan Research, who analyse the data and sell it on.

– Location intelligence firms. These specialised companies sell geolocation analyses to bigger corporate clients e.g., hedge funds and venture capital and private equity firms.

What The Data Is Used For?

Our location data (which may have been aggregated and analysed) is used for many different end purposes, and there are many companies in the location intelligence ecosystem involved in making location monitoring capabilities and tools.

Some examples of how our location data may be used include:

– Property firms, hedge funds and retail businesses using the data for their own advertising, analytics, and marketing.

– Advertisers/advertising platforms using the data for targeting ads.

– Market intelligence companies using the data to highlight patterns and trends.

Examples of how location monitoring capabilities and tools are being developed include:

– Grand View Research (GVR) reports that some of the big investors in location intelligence technologies include Google, ESRI, Qualcomm, AT&T, Intel, and Apple. This area of location intelligence is more concerned with integrating real-time location monitoring capabilities in devices (smartphones, vehicles, and aircraft) to allow businesses to improve marketing or optimise business operations.

– Industries such as utility and energy, retail, transportation, telecom, and manufacturing use location intelligence tools to help with management and increase productivity and profitability.

Is It Legal?

In consenting to allow apps to use a person’s location (e.g. for its correct operation), this is legal, although it may be the case that there are a number of other T&Cs, most likely in the privacy policy, that users quickly sign-up to that they may not have the time or inclination to read, but may give a wider scope of consent than they would like.

Although consent may be given to apps for sharing location data, and sharing data for specific related purposes, there are many cases where legal objections have been filed and investigations have taken place into who location has been shared with. For example:

– Feb 2019, City of Los Angeles sued The Weather Channel for allegedly using its app to mine users’ private geolocation data and sending it to IBM affiliates and third parties for advertising and commercial purposes unrelated to weather.

– In June 2020, US Members of Congress opened an investigation into a data analytics company Venntel. The company aggregates location data from smartphone apps (games and weather forecast apps) and the investigation related to allegations that the company may have been selling people’s location data to government agencies such as the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The rapid growth of the Internet, smartphone ownership, the IoT, the growing app market, and the potential for profit have fuelled the development of a whole location intelligence industry and ecosystem. This in itself has created opportunities for many different kinds of businesses that buy, sell, aggregate, analyse, and use location data. Businesses across the world use data and information, which includes a contribution from location data, as the basis for strategies, tactics and campaigns that deliver profits and as such, it is clear to see how our location data helps to feed the business world in a positive way. The questions and uneasiness about location details being gathered, bought, and sold, however, relate more about matters of privacy and ethics. Low consent rates in apps asking for locations, the knowledge that seemingly anonymous data from one source could be combined and aggregated from other sources to potentially identify us/identify more about us, and the idea that privacy policies (that we don’t have time to read) can include things that we would question, all add up to a feeling of uneasiness and mistrust.  Just as tracking cookies are being rejected, questions are now rightly being asked about what apps are sharing, who they are sharing it with, and for what purpose. Location intelligence is an area that has such complex connections between players in the market, that transparency and further regulation is some way off.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds an extra security dimension to accounts, and with Google now heading down the route of automatically enrolling millions of users into 2FA, here’s how to check if 2FA is turned on for your Google account:

– Go to your account settings through myaccount.google.com on your desktop (or phone).

– Click on the Security section (left-hand pane).

– Scroll down to the Signing in to Google section.

– Click on the ‘2-Step Verification’ option.

OR

– Go to Google’s Security Checkup page (https://myaccount.google.com/intro/security-checkup).

– Scroll down to the ‘2-Step Verification’ section and click on the settings to see your current 2FA status plus any recommendations.

After a recent report found that poor domain security has left most Global 2000 companies vulnerable to the threats of phishing and brand abuse, we take a closer look at domain security and how businesses can maximise their protection against popular threats.

CSC Research – Domains Dangerously Under-Protected

Recent research by US-based CSC, which describes itself as “a world leader in business, legal, tax, and domain security” has shown that web domains of the Global 2000 companies remain dangerously under protected. The research revealed some worrying statistics, including:

– 81 per cent of companies are not using registry locks. Not using a registry lock means that (for example) a registrar could move your domain to another registrar on its own and/or the domain could be hijacked.

– 70 per cent of homoglyph (i.e. fuzzy match) domains are owned by third parties . This is a tactic known to be commonly used in phishing and brand abuse (refer ‘typosquatting’) . A homoglyph (name spoofing) attack uses processes or domain names that are visually similar to legitimate and recognised names to fool unsuspecting users, who may not notice a minor difference (e.g. Unicode characters from non-Latin character sets) in the domain name, into clicking on a malicious link.

– Only 50 per cent are using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) records as an email authentication method.

– 43 per cent are configured with MX (email) records that can be used to send phishing emails or to intercept email.

– 57 per cent of the Global 2000 are relying on off-the-shelf consumer-grade registrars who offer limited domain security mechanisms to protect against domain and DNS hijacking.

Also, the research found that among the 70 per cent of the third-party domains deemed suspicious:

– 56 per cent were pointing to advertising, pay-per-click content, or being used for domain parking (registering a domain name but not linking it to any services e.g., e-mail or a website).

– 38 per cent had inactive web content (there are technical problems, problems with the account, or they don’t have nameservers associated with them).

What Are The Main Risks and Threats To Domain Security?

Some of the main risks and threats to your domain security include:

– Your registrar being compromised or hackers gaining access to your account with the company where you registered your domain name, or to the e-mail address that “reset password” forms on their websites send emails to. This can allow hackers to transfer the domain to another registrar, gaining complete ownership over it.

– Domain spoofing, used by phishers and malicious third parties to fool users into clicking onto domains that are visually similar to the legitimate domain e.g., Fuzzy matches/typo squatting, Homoglyphs – IDNs, Cousin domains, Keyword match, and Homophones (Soundex).

– Cybersquatting/brand jacking/name jacking i.e., the unauthorised registering and use of a domain name that is identical or similar to trademarks, service marks, company names, or personal names. In the US, this is a crime under the 1999 Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (ACPA).

– Sophisticated DNS attacks that can allow hackers to create confusion and redirect some of your website users to their servers.

– Reverse domain hijacking – i.e. whereby another entity deliberately registers something with the name of your domain/trademark and accusing you of stealing their domain.

– Not having DNS redundancy – i.e. a lack of a failsafe solution or a backup mechanism for DNS outages, such as having a having secondary DNS. A lack of DNS redundancy can leave the business open to threats like a reduced resiliency to DDoS attacks, and the associated problems of down-time, disruption to business continuity, revenue loss and diminished reputation.

– Not using certificate authority authorisation (CAA) records i.e., not designating a specific certificate authority (CA) to be the sole issuer of certificates for your company’s domains. Not using CAA could allow a cybercriminal to use the appointed certificate authority to get a new certificate and could represent a threat to compliance.

– Not authenticating the company’s email channel with DMARC, SPF, or DKIM. Sender Policy Framework /SPF, for example, enables a domain to state which servers can send emails on its behalf, and DMARC is an email validation system. Not authenticating the company’s email channel can leave the business open to threats like having the company’s email domain being used for email spoofing, phishing scams, and other cybercrimes.

– Not staying on top of matters relating domain renewals, thereby potentially allowing a company domain to be purchased and used by another party, perhaps for malicious purposes.

– Not having a security certificate (https). This protocol uses encryption to protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user’s computer and the site. The authentication aspect proves that users are communicating with the intended website, and can, therefore, protect against man-in-the-middle attacks and build/maintain user trust, not to mention improving the search engine profile and ranking.

What About GDPR Domain Masking?

The introduction of GDPR meant that the identity of a domain name registrant couldn’t be published in the public WHOIS database (without consent) and without the risk of penalties. This, however, is a two-edged sword, as it gives criminals more anonymity for registering domain names for malicious purposes, and can stop investigators and security professionals from uncovering dangerous/malicious/phishing website owners. There are, however, ways for cybercriminals and investigators to find out the identity of a domain owner.

How To Boost Your Domain Security

Despite significant potential domain security risks and threats, there are a number of measures that you can take to plug this potential gap in your business cyber security strategy. These measures include:

– Choosing a professional, reliable, and reputable business-focused registrar.

– Authenticating your email channel with DMARC, SPF, or DKIM to minimise the incidence of email spoofing and potential phishing.

– Using enterprise-grade DNS hosting. This could mean consolidating your domain, DNS, and digital certificate providers into one enterprise-class provider.

– Incorporating secure domain, DNS, and digital certificate practices into the overall cyber security posture.

– Using a registry lock for your domain to prevent the risks of administrative and technical hijacking.

– Using domain privacy services and ensuring that WHOIS details are redacted.

– Ensuring that there is DNS redundancy (a failsafe/backup for DNS outages e.g., a secondary DNS).

– Adding CAA records to allow for policy enforcement and to mitigate cyber threats such as HTTPS phishing of hijacked sub domains.

– Buying security certificates for domains (https).

– Continuous monitoring of the domain space and key digital channels e.g., marketplaces, apps, social media, and email for any evidence of brand abuse, infringements, phishing, and fraud.

– Minimising third-party risk by looking at/auditing the business practices of the domain registrar to make sure they are not contributing to fraud and brand abuse e.g., through operating domain marketplaces, domain name spinning, and more.

– Maintaining good basic cyber security practices that can prevent hacks or accounts being compromised that could lead to domains being hijacked and more.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The security of your company domain(s) is an often overlooked part in the cyber security strategy of a business and yet, a domain is direct, public part of your brand and reputation that (if successfully attacked and compromised) could lead to huge technical, legal, monetary, and reputational damage to your business. Research, such as that by CSC, confirms that businesses are still taking big risks by not addressing domain security, and cyber criminals use domains as a key part of popular attack methods such as phishing. There are, as outlined in the article, basic measures that businesses can take to make sure that their domains are protected, and that threats to domain security are addressed.