Privacy

6 June 2012 at 10:11am
Incident response, as performed by CERTs, CSIRTs and other related acronyms, is an essential part of keeping the Internet habitable, however it raises some interesting data protection issues. In most data protection scenarios, you know in advance what people and what information you are going to be processing, so you can give them prior notice, design systems and processes to be compliant, and so on.
6 June 2012 at 10:10am
An Occasionally Asked Question (an OAQ?) is "are IP addresses personal data?". That question is probably too broad to ever get a simple answer, but a recent decision by the Irish High Court  (EMI Records & Others v Eircom Ltd [2010] IEHC 108) has at least answered the related question "are logs indexed by IP address always personal data?".
6 June 2012 at 10:04am
In a speech last month European Commissioner Viviane Reding gave an indication of some of the technologies and other developments perceived as  causing problems for Europe's fifteen year old Data Protection law:
6 June 2012 at 10:00am
Last week JANET(UK) held its 38th Networkshop in Manchester and a thoroughly enjoyable and informative event it was.
6 June 2012 at 9:52am
In a speech on European Data Protection Day last week, the European Commissioner for the Information Society, Viviane Reding, suggested areas that might be addressed in the forthcoming revision of the Data Protection Directive: We need to clarify the application of some key rules and principles (such as consent and transparency) in practice;
6 June 2012 at 9:48am
The Article 29 Working Party is the group of all the national data protection regulators in Europe, who jointly publish opinions and commentary on law and practice in the area of data protection. Their response to the Commission's consultation on modernising the Data Protection Directive has now been published.
6 June 2012 at 9:47am
The Commission have been running a consultation for several months to inform a possible revision of the Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC), which is now fifteen years old and starting to creak under the strain of new ways of doing business.
6 June 2012 at 9:47am
The Information Commissioner has now launched a draft text for a new guide on Personal Information Online, with an opportunity to comment on the text over the next three months. It's good to see that some of the issues I raised at a preparatory meeting have been included, so I'd encourage readers to have a look at the draft guide and provide their own comments.
6 June 2012 at 9:45am
The amended EC law requiring opt-in, rather than opt-out, to non-essential cookies was criticised last week as "breathtakingly stupid" because of its implications for advert-funded sites. However advertisers have now said that they don't think the law requires any change to current practice!
6 June 2012 at 9:44am
The draft Digital Economy Bill has been published and will now begin to be debated by the Houses of Parliament. Most of the Bill is as expected from the various ministerial statements over the summer. Two measures to reduce copyright infringement will be introduced immediately:
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