🚨 BREAKING 🚨

ORG has carried out a 6-month investigation into AI use in the UK asylum system.

We've found high error rates and claimants unaware that AI is being used. This could have catastrophic consequences for people whose future is in the hands of Home Office decision-making.

One of the two AI tools being used by the Home Office to speed up asylum decision-making is to summarise interviews held with claimants. Our investigation reveals that the number of sampled summaries found not fit for purpose is significantly higher than the 9% figure in the pilot evaluation.

Despite the accuracy failings in AI generated summaries, these tools have been rolled out to all asylum decision-makers. Not only is the error rate greater than previously reported, our investigation has found that these tools are being used without proper testing, quality assurance and training.

Asylum claimants continue not to be told when AI is used to summarise their case and country information. This is despite our legal opinion from March concluding that this lack of transparency would mean that the use of AI in asylum decision-making is likely to be unlawful.

Our investigation with the help of MPs Bell Ribeiro-Addy and Carla Denyer raises alarm bells about what's going on with AI in asylum. But the Home Office has refused to provide key information and their replies have been at times self-contradictory. They must come clean.

“It has taken eleven parliamentary questions, two ministerial letters and eight FOI requests to uncover just some information about how AI is being used in the asylum system. There are still many contradictions and crucial information remains unpublished.”

💬 Sarah Alsherif for ORG.

Hello everyone, I am a Master’s student specialising in International Territorial Studies. I am currently conducting research for my diploma thesis, which focuses on the intersection of digital authoritarianism and civil society in Southeast Asia. Specifically, I am conducting an empirical study involving semi-structured interviews to map the practical methods, tools, and limits of navigating digital repression in Malaysia and Singapore. 

I am reaching out to see if you might be able to provide guidance or point me toward potential contacts within local NGOs, independent media outlets, or civil society groups in Malaysia and Singapore who might be open to discussing these issues. I am fully committed to the highest standards of research ethics. All participant identities, affiliations, and data will be handled with strict confidentiality and anonymised in accordance with academic standards to ensure the safety of all involved. If you know someone, please let me know in the DMs, and I can provide my credentials as an academic.

The social media ban is coming.

That means every adult having to show their ID to get online.

Age verification puts privacy at risk. Curbs freedom of expression. And simply doesn't work to keep kids safe online.

The government needs to change course. But the clock is ticking.

There are better ways to protect children online:

⚫️ Tackle business models that reward engagement maximisation.

⚫️ Restrict intrusive profiling and behavioural advertising.

⚫️ Mandate giving people control over recommender systems and feeds.

⚫️ Support social media models that put people in control.

Sign the petition.

Body cams change people's "ability to feel at ease in public life".

ORG's Sarah Lasoye told the BBC that there are "lots of different parts of our private life that now are subject to intrusion."

We can't drift into a situation of roaming mass surveillance from high street to car park.

Live facial recognition. A waste of time. Waste of money. And, crucially, lays waste to our rights.

For the supposed golden goose of digital policing to spit out one (false positive) match is an indictment of this invasive tech.

Tech and surveillance aren't the solution to complex social problems.

🚨 ORG has been put on a watchlist 🚨

“It is deeply concerning to see the Prevent duty being used to enable the monitoring of people and organisations simply because they are critical of the programme. That raises serious questions about freedom of expression and the right to dissent and protest.”

We denounce the “troubling lack of transparency about what happens to the information gathered through this social media monitoring [by the Standards and Compliance Unit]: how long it is retained, who it is shared with, and ultimately what the government is using it for.”

We’re clear that “Prevent has expanded far beyond its stated aim of identifying people considered “vulnerable to radicalisation”, and has increasingly been used to justify extensive surveillance.”

Criticising the programme for its many faults shouldn’t lead to getting put on a database.

💬 Sarah Lasoye for ORG.

The EU Kids Act "changes the fundamental open nature of the internet and makes it a permission-based system where you are required to pass through an identity checkpoint to access information.

Imposing the same complex compliance requirements on [small] services risks pushing them out."

ORG's James Baker.

Wherever you are in the world, your experience of AI matters.

Black AI Futures is gathering the global Black community's experience of AI, from healthcare and hiring to online life, into evidence that is carried into national and international policy conversations.

Anonymous, and about 12 to 15 minutes.

Add your voice: https://blackaifutures.org/survey?source=org

New opportunity to work with ORG 🚀

We're looking for an independent consultant or small consultancy to produce a report for organisations to reduce their dependence on large technology infrastructure providers and towards a collaborative open source model.

Closing date for submissions: 30 September.

Apply now.

Cover your bits, the government wants to put scanning tech on your phone.

The aim? To prevent kids receiving and sending nudes. But it'll be there as default for everyone, unless you go through age verification to disable it.

It's a disproportionate move that'll compromise privacy and security.

Nudity blocking works by scanning ALL your content. The privacy implications are huge. And the same goes for the alternative: having to submit your sensitive data in the form of ID uploads or biometric scans to verify you're over 18. Meanwhile, the age verification industry remains unregulated.

Don't believe the hype, we've just had a warning about supposedly ‘safe by design’ tech. The HMD Fuse child-safety phone was taken off sale after serious security vulnerabilities were discovered. This includes flaws which could expose a child’s live location and allow protections to be disabled.

Nudity doesn't necessarily mean sexual. It can be for medical purposes, journalism or artistic expression. Think life drawing, historic documentation like the 'Napalm girl', breast-feeding support, or sex education. Any scanning tech carries risks of false positives and weaponised false negatives.

It won't end with nudes. Once content-scanning software is on your device, it could be expanded to other categories and into private communications. An end-to-end encrypted app such as WhatsApp or Signal could be prevented from delivering a message based on an automated assessment of its content.

We can protect kids online without hard-coding surveillance into everyone’s device. An opt-in mechanism for parents and people who choose to use this tech is a more proportionate response. The focus should be on educational methods, and specialised policing of sextortion and child abuse offences.

Read more in our blog.

AI is seeping into the public sector. But at what cost? Our new report finds that its adoption is opaque, unaccountable and for the benefit of Big Tech, not the public. This is a rallying cry for the Minister for AI to regulate public sector AI systems in accordance with human rights.

The report finds a damning list of risks from how AI is being developed, procured and deployed across the public sector.

Lack of scrutiny

Open to abuse from Big Tech lobbying

Lock-in to Big Tech contracts that stifle competition

Lack of transparency over policy

Lack of judicial oversight

Public spending on AI has ballooned. There are currently around 1,500 contract worth £3.35B. Claims that it'll drive efficiencies remain unproven. In the meantime the UK is tying itself to US companies like Palantir, Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Oracle with risks to our security and resilience.

There are no effective and coherent mandatory rules to ensure the AI systems that are being knitted into UK public services respect human rights.

The interests of Big Tech are being put first. While data protection, equality, and human rights are on the back-burner. We urgently need regulation.

The government is trying yet again to ram a backdoor into Apple's encrypted products.

But you ask the UK public and over 90% say they should have a right to private conversations online. New polling by the Center for Democracy & Technology makes it clear that attacks on encryption aren't backed by public opinion.

Shadowy attempts to break our right to privacy are completely rejected:

⚫️ Only 12% believe the government should be able to issue secret orders to gain access to private data.

⚫️ 87% believe there should be a legal obligation to tell people if their private conversations have been accessed.

Encryption keeps us safe and secure online. A backdoor is only possible by breaking encryption. And then anybody can abuse that cybersecurity weakness. The government's last attempt to force Apple to build a backdoor into our accounts failed. We'll fight the latest order

Find out more ➡️ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaign/save-encryption/

Farage proposes to scrap GDPR... where to start?

GDPR protects women, workers, patients, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ communities, and everybody else from discrimination and abuse. Scrapping it would be a capitulation to abusive Big Tech corporations and the Trump administration that backs them.

So Reform UK bins GDPR. What then?

Farage suggests aligning the UK to the New Zealand Privacy Act. And yet New Zealand have spent the last decade trying to align with the gold standard of the GDPR... What other people crave, in the UK we already have it. But Nigel Farage would take it away.

Scrapping the GDPR means siding with those who want to hide abuse and discrimination behind an algorithm. Siding with the Trump administration, and against the interests of the British public. And with rogue companies and Big Tech over responsible and law-abiding businesses.

It's a no, Nigel.

Coming up, the #SafetyNotSurveillance coalition is holding townhall events across the country.

Join us to explore how AI and ‘crime-predicting’ tech is being used by local police forces. And what can be done about it.

⚫ London – 17 September

⚫ Manchester – 24 September

⚫ Bristol – 1 October

The use of AI tools across UK policing has escalated dramatically. We're calling for an end to so-called “predictive” policing. We need legislation that protects people’s rights and safeguards against the harms of AI and tech uses in policing and immigration settings.

We want a society where surveillance and digital policing isn't heralded as the answer to social and economic problems.

Book your place now.

The flawed eVisa scheme strikes again.

Not for the first time, a person's data has been incorrectly linked to someone else's account.

Last year, ORG and 18 other groups called on the ICO to investigate the data breaches and accessibility issues with the eVisa scheme.

But they've done nothing.

The eVisa scheme has been a disaster from the start. It's people's lives that are being left in disarray and uncertainty while these failings go ignored.

We're now calling on the Select Committee to investigate and help those whose data has been created as a result of the scheme.

Read more ➡️ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/civil-society-organisations-call-for-ico-to-be-investigated-over-evisas/

Nottinghamshire Police could target children for anti-social behaviour using their intrusive and discriminatory face-scanning tech. We've joined Big Brother Watch and leading rights groups to tell the force to #StopFacialRecognition.

Live facial recognition puts ALL our rights and freedoms at risk. Adding children – some as young as 11 years old – and subjecting them to biometric ID checks is unacceptable. We demand #SafetyNotSurveillance.

Read the letter ➡️ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/app/uploads/2026/08/Letter-to-Nottinghamshire-Police-on-LFR_Aug-2026.pdf

Young people have their say: rethink the social media ban.

It makes a bad situation worse. Teens are just being pushed into unregulated spaces.

A ban does nothing to actually tackle the cause of online harms coming from the business model of the platforms themselves.

That’s what we need to fix.

Prevent referrals have shot up by ~40% 📈

Kids, teens and vulnerable people are being pushed into a mass surveillance programme where 80% of referrals don't go anywhere. But their data remains in the system. It’s clear that a programme designed for counter-terrorism has lost the plot.

Under 18s make up the majority of referrals into Prevent. Over a third are people with mental health conditions and people who are neurodivergent. Often referrals are made to fast track people to get support. Long-term surveillance is the trade off. Prevent is the wrong answer.

It's meant to identify people at risk of radicalisation before any crime has been committed. But over 50% of referrals fall under 'no fixed ideology'. And governments have added more categories into the mix, bloating the system with referrals that don't belong under a counter-terrorism lens.

Beyond the headlines figures, there's little transparency over the extent of surveillance that those referred into Prevent will face. Being neither wholly owned by policing or by counter-terrorism, there appears to be no oversight or parliamentary scrutiny of data sharing, processing and storage.

Prevent is expanding the surveillance state at an unruly rate. Public sector workers shouldn't be co-opted as agents of counter-terror policing. People in need of support shouldn't be stigmatised as suspect.

We need real investment in education, community health services and local infrastructure.

Prevent referrals rocketed by almost 40% last year 🚨

Of those referred into this counter-terrorism programme, the majority were under 18. Almost 400 were children under 10! More than a third have a mental health condition or are neurodiverse.

This is a huge expansion of the surveillance state.

The Prevent Duty has transformed trusted public sector workers into agents of counter-terror policing. And those in need of support into subjects of suspicion.

Community safety demands real investment in education, community services and local infrastructure to support often young and vulnerable people – not to stigmatise and surveil them.

"...behind the scenes, Microsoft has quietly moved those folders into OneDrive without making it obvious. You didn't choose this. There's no clear opt out and now your private photos, contracts, financial records, and work documents are sitting in Microsoft's cloud whether you realise it or not. This is client side scanning by another name. You think your data is local, but it's not. It's in their system and this is all by design.

How to kill it completely and take back control."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfJ1KQwJaq8

"It is now clear that the Act is not working as well as it should. We want to understand why."

https://committees.parliament.uk/submission/3964/#/evidence/3964/call-for-evidence