Category: News

The Local Government Finance Bill, now before Parliament, is drafted in such a way that it could permit the routine disclosure of tax records and other personal data held by HMRC to council officers for several council tax related purposes. The powers also allow HMRC to disclose such details directly to contractors of the Council (e.g. perhaps those IT service providers based overseas or in the Cloud); this could permit tax details to go to many interesting destinations outside the

I have just attended an interesting (and partly depressing) data protection event which considered the implementation of the Data Protection Regulation. The European Commission’s spokesperson (Paul Nemitz) signalled an inflexible approach towards the implementation of the Data Protection Regulation; he stated that he would consider amendments that make the Regulation work better but not those amendments that were based on alternative (and better) ideas. At the meeting Mr Nemitz pointedly said that in Germany there is a high level of

The Huffington Post has recently published a story that begins thus:  “When Justin Bassett interviewed for a new job, he expected the usual questions about experience and references. So he was astonished when the interviewer asked for something else: his Facebook username and password”. So what would you do in such circumstances? And what would the data protection implications be if this happened in the UK?  The conclusions I have reached is that the UK Data Protection Act would apply

Next week, the ICO is holding a meeting to discuss, in detail, the Regulation as published by the European Commission. So, I have decided to publish our comments on the Regulation (see references) and use this blog to provide a summary of the key points. The comments I make focus on how the Regulation can be improved from the data subject perspective. This is because the initial “Call for Evidence” by the MoJ was more like a “Call for Ammunition”, where the

 DAPIX is the Working Party on Information Exchange and Data Protection where delegations of civil servants from Member States discuss the European Commission’s Data Protection Regulation. The minutes of the meeting held on 23-24 February shows that there are deep divisions as to the content of the Regulation; in fact, the minutes record that only “a few delegations supported the Commission in its choice of a Regulation”. I can also reveal the Commission’s “hoped-for” timescale for the discussions about