Privacy International

📢 New tech research 📢 We uncover the harms of the UK Home Office’s latest migration surveillance tools.

The UK are deploying portable fingerprint scanners, termed ‘non-fitted devices’ (NFDs), that track the live GPS location of migrants on immigration bail and demand that they provide their fingerprints at random intervals per day.

https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5457/non-fitted-devices-home-offices-surveillance-arsenal-investigating-technology-behind

Non-fitted devices in the Home Office’s surveillance arsenal: Investigating the technology behind GPS fingerprint scanners

IntroductionWith the ongoing expansion of GPS tagging under the UK Home Office's electronic monitoring programme, it has increasingly deployed non-fitted devices (NFDs) that tra

Privacy International
Oct 30, 2024 at 2:03pmWeb
Show threadPrivacy InternationalOct 30, 2024

The Home Office claims these devices are ‘less intrusive’ than GPS tags, but wearers have reported detrimental impacts like paranoia, social stigma and anxiety due to the pervasive and erratic alerts.

We acquired a similar device and wrote pseudocode to customise the SDK, writing four functions based on the test device’s javadoc and creating a visual mock-up of this modified version of the NFD.

Our research shows that this technology is deployed in a particularly intrusive & arbitrary way.