Category: News

Happy New Year. Nice to be back at work, I think not. In a 215 page report, the European Parliament has suggested 350 Amendments to the text of the Data Protection Regulation published last year. This blog gives you an impression of those proposed changes that caught my eye on a “speed read” of the Report (produced by Jan Albrecht, the rapporteur for the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs). I think the most important proposal is the fettering

On Tuesday, a joint Committee of Parliament will report its views on the proposed Data Retention Bill. This is the piece of legislation which, if enacted as published, would require ISPs, Google, telecoms operators and service providers etc to keep details of our use of the Internet (e.g. who we contact, when. where from etc.) are retained for up to a year. The purpose of this retention is to allow law enforcement agencies and national security agencies to dip into this information

Note: this blog was published 20 hrs before the very sad news of the suicide of the nurse who was the subject of the hoax. A quick blog about the press coverage of the prank call concerning Kate Middleton’s morning sickness. It appears that this has overlooked some interesting data protection aspects relating to criminal offences and monetary penalty notices First is the prank an offence under Section 55 the Data Protection Act? At first sight, the answer is “yes”

Have you followed all the hand wringing by Government about the statutory underpinning of the Leveson Principles? Have you seen the press coverage equating statutory underpinning with state control? Evidently the Government say there are pages and pages of legislation to draft in order to underpin, in law, an independent self-regulatory body for the Press. So in the spirit of “Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals” here is a statutory underpinning of the Leveson Principles in 133 words of law. Like Jamie’s

Prime Minister, David Cameron, has expressed "serious concerns and misgivings" over bringing in laws to underpin any new body to regulate the press. Mr Cameron told MPs that legislation backing a regulatory body underpinned by statute would "cross the Rubicon" by writing elements of press regulation into the law for the "first time". Because of this, Mr Cameron, is “not convinced at this stage that statute is necessary to achieve Lord Justice Leveson’s objectives”. In my view the Rubicon has been

At a meeting of the Council of Ministers at the end of last month, the UK Government joined the Governments of Denmark, Slovenia, Belgium, Hungary and Sweden in opposing the Commission’s Data Protection Regulation; instead these countries want a new Data Protection Directive. Only Bulgaria, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Greece and Ireland expressed support for the concept of a Data Protection Regulation. Sensing that the Regulation might be in trouble, the European Commissioner proposing the Regulation (Ms. Reding)

Gosh, crumbs and crikey! Talk about the “Road to Damascus”. The Information Commissioner, in his Enforcement Notice issued to Southampton City Council in July, has made an express link between Article 8 of the Human Rights Convention and lawful processing under the First Data Protection Principle. Furthermore, Southampton has appealed the Notice; this means the Tribunal should hear arguments about Article 8 and adjudicate, in detail, on how Human Rights and Data Protection legislation interact. I have often moaned (and