Author: info@amberhawk.com

The “Protection of Freedoms Bill” has a wholly misleading title; the legislation simply does not do what it says on the tin.  The CCTV provisions (see blog of 16/2/2011) have more to do with efficient surveillance rather than privacy protection, and in my last blog (3/3/2011), I reviewed the Information Commissioner’s concerns re the use of personal data in DNA profiling or in vetting. For completeness, this blog addresses the additional privacy protection afforded by the proposed changes to the

The Information Commissioner (ICO) has just published a critique of the Home Office’s Freedoms Bill, which is being sold to the public as reining-in New Labour’s surveillance state. This blog reports on this critique (for a copy, see references). Although there is general applause for the fact that the Government has recognised that there has been excessive intrusion into privacy, the ICO’s analysis points to a number of serious deficiencies. I report most of these difficulties mainly in the Commissioner’s

Last week the European Commission unveiled its proposal for a Directive that allows for the interchange of Passenger Name Records (PNR) relating to all air travellers flying internationally within the European Union. Surprisingly, the drafting of the Directive reveals that it is disproportionate! When you first look at the Directive, with its emphasis on the use of PNR records in relation to “terrorist offences” or “serious transnational crime”, the first response is: “that’s OK with me”. Even when there is

Last Friday, data protection day, was commemorated with a meeting organised by the Ministry of Justice in Whitehall. At that meeting, David Smith, the Deputy Information Commissioner (“D. I. C.”), reviewed the Information Commissioner’s wish list of changes to data protection law. This blog reports on the content of that list. Regulation or new Directive Speaking to “very well informed sources” at a break in the meeting it became clear that the UK Government wants the changes to data protection

What does future legislation in the field of privacy and data protection look like? An idea can be garnered by looking at the common ground between privacy advocates such as Privacy International (PI), academic groupings such as Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre at the Faculty of Law of the University of New South Wales (CLPC), and Regulators such as the Information Commissioner (ICO) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). All these groupings want a definition of personal data that