At Jisc's Learning Analytics Network meeting last month I presented an updated version of my suggested legal model for Learning Analytics.
Recently I've been doing some work with Niall Sclater on how education organisations might inform students about the use of learning analytics, and when they might seek students' consent. The resulting blog post is at https://analytics.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/02/16/consent-for-learning-analytics-some-practical-guidance-for-institutions/
The latest announcement from the Article 29 Working Party on the US-EU Privacy Shield also suggests that there shouldn't be any short-term surprises for those using the other justifications for exporting personal data to the USA.
More than a decade ago the e-Privacy Directive mentioned "location data" in the context of telecommunications services. At the time that was almost entirely about mobile phone locations - data processed by just a handful of network providers - but nowadays many more organisations are able to gather location data about wifi-enabled devices in range of their access points.
The European Commission has now published draft texts that could be used to implement an EU/US Privacy Shield to replace the previous Safe Harbor agreement. It appears that the new scheme would only cover "commercial exchanges" of personal data between the EU and US so it is unlikely to be appropriate for export of personal data to US universities or non-profit organisations.
The Article 29 Working Party of European data protection supervisors had hoped to make a full statement on the EU/US Safe Harbor agreement at the end of January. However this has now been postponed, probably until mid-April. The European Court of Justice declared last October that the original Safe Harbor did not guarantee adequate protection when personal data were transferred from Europe to the USA.
The Information Commissioner's Office has published a new article on how they are responding to the European Court's Safe Harbor judgment. The overall message is that data controllers should take stock and not panic. While noting that the judgment does remove some of the former legal certainty, the ICO is "certainly not rushing to use our enforcement powers".
The European Court's declaration today that the European Commission's fifteen year old decision on the US Safe Harbor scheme is no longer reliable is another recognition that Data Protection requires continuing assessment, rather than one-off decisions. European regulators have been recommending for years that neither data controllers nor companies to which they export data should rely on Safe Harbor certification alone. The U.K.
The Information Commissioner has published updated and extended guidance on the use of the Data Protection Act's "section 29" exemption, based on cases and wider experience. This exemption is often used to release personal information (such as computer or network logs) to the police or other authorities investigating crimes, so sections 33-52 in particular are worth reading as a refresher.
The points I'm most often asked about are:
