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Hi, it's Rina, giving Sam a much-needed break this week to look back on some of our coverage this year at Context.

Not everything this year in the tech world was about Elon Musk's shenanigans at Twitter, or crypto exchanges collapsing - though it certainly seemed that way. Here are some stories on state surveillance and privacy violations from around the world, and some thoughts on where we might be headed next year.

The unrest in Iran was arguably one of the biggest stories this year. Led largely by women after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody, the protests showed a sinister side to the use of technology in the country - not just to block social media sites so that damning images and videos could not be published - but also facial recognition systems that were used to identify protesters and women flouting the strict hijab law.

The systems in Iran most likely came from China, which is selling digital surveillance technology to dozens of countries under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), typically under the guise of smart policing or smart cities programmes.

Like Cambodia, where surveillance cameras and drones, as well as digital tools for monitoring social media sites have been targeting activists and union leaders in the capital Phnom Penh. And Myanmar, where the junta is using such technology to target dissidents.

"We are all afraid of the CCTV," said a lawyer who provides legal aid to political prisoners in the city of Mandalay.

However, the technology in Afghanistan to record data of citizens, judges, police and security forces - that the Taliban are now using to hunt them down - came from well-meaning aid agencies and international donors. Which just goes to show there's no telling whose hands data can fall in, and what uses it can be put to.

The systems were "a big mistake right from the beginning," said an Afghan activist who gets hundreds of desperate messages every day from Afghans in hiding more than a year on from the takeover by the Taliban.

Massive failure

Facial recognition software to identify problem gamblers? Yes we can, say gambling venues in New South Wales in Australia, which are set to roll out the controversial technology next year. They claim it can help identify problem gamblers, so they can be barred from entering casinos and escorted away from slot machines. All without updates to the country’s Privacy Act to address the use of facial recognition.

Also in Australia, an ongoing government inquiry into an automated debt recovery scheme, known as Robodebt, underlines the perils of artificial intelligence-based welfare systems. About 400,000 welfare recipients were wrongly accused of misreporting their income, slapped with fines, and had their lives upended, Seb Starcevic reported.

A minister called the scheme - which ran from July 2015 to November 2019 - a "massive failure of policy and law". But that doesn't mean it won't happen again. 

Predatory apps

Algorithms are increasingly playing a role in major life decisions, whether we want them to or not. Carey Biron reported on hopeful tenants in the United States getting rejected by automated screening programmes that scan credit scores, eviction or criminal histories, and even social media activity to determine if an applicant is a rental risk. But these algorithms lock in bias and perpetuate inequality, and can have devastating consequences for those who are at the receiving end.

The EU’s AI Act and Directive on AI Liability aim to address such issues, but how effective they can be is debatable.

Elsewhere, as the cost of living soared, so did the use of digital lending apps - and their abuse of lenders' data and privacy.

In Mexico, correspondent Diana Baptista found at least 29 loan apps with millions of downloads in the Google Play Store that have been reported for extortion, fraud, violation of Mexican privacy law, and abusive financial practices.

They are part of an explosion of predatory lending apps worldwide that authorities have struggled to contain, from India to Kenya and beyond.

Always watching

Where climate activists go, can surveillance be far behind?

In November, as the world descended on Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh for the COP27 climate conference, Nazih Osseiran reported on the official app that digital rights experts said spied on users (including thousands of journalists, activists and business leaders), who were required to give up personal information and keep location tracking turned on.

Surveillance concerns were also raised around the officials apps for the Winter Olympics in Beijing this year and the FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

And finally, we did a series of stories on how high-tech tools are being used to monitor the movements of refugees and migrants at borders and within their countries, and to also control their access to public services.

These include the drones and smart towers on the world's most surveilled border between the United States and Mexico that’s forcing migrants to take deadlier routes to avoid detection; GPS ankle tags in Britain; blockchain technology in Syrian refugee camps in Jordan; and ID cards that have gradually erased the identity of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

What does next year hold? More regulations certainly, but will they be enough to stop the onward creep of surveillance technologies and the weaponisation of data by governments and companies?

We asked some experts. "Next year we should expect much more of the same," said Jathan Sadowski at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab, Monash University. Read all the predictions about what the next year will bring in the world of tech, from AI, to crypto; Twitter, to digital rights, in our look-ahead to 2023.

We are taking a break next week, and regular programming will resume in January. Until then, happy holidays.

We're always happy to hear your suggestions about what to cover in this newsletter - drop us a line: newsletter@context.news