Category: News

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

Is an IP address or an URL personal data? Should it be personal data? Anyway, given the European-wide review of the Data Protection Directive, I have decided to put my head above the parapet and describe what I think the definition of personal data should look like. Of course, readers might disagree – but all I would say that if we don’t have any idea of what the definition should look like, then Governments and the European Commission will happily

There is a trend to equate “privacy” with “data protection” probably because many USA organisations like Google like to use the “p-word” quite a lot and there is a common desire to be “privacy friendly”. However, when you make this equation, it can be at the expense of ignoring many important data protection safeguards. The divergence between the concepts of “privacy” and “data protection” emerges by an analysis of some of the Generally Accepted Privacy Principles (GAPP), which fall a

I have concluded that proposals published by the Government in relation to “the bonfire of the quangos” (the Public Bodies Bill) and in relation to reform of Parliament (the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill) can both serve to weaken the effectiveness of the supervision of the Data Protection Act. There is a significant risk that a future Government could use powers in both Bills to reduce Parliamentary scrutiny of its own processing of personal data or threaten the Information

The Information Commissioner has been widely condemned by privacy activists for his perceived inaction with respect to Google. Although he concluded that it was likely that there was a significant breach of the Data Protection Act when Google Street View cars collected wi-fi data as part of their street mapping exercises, he has rejected calls for his office to impose a monetary penalty. Instead, he has “invited” Google UK to sign an undertaking – something that has yet to happen.

We have just published on the website our response to the Government’s consultation on the Directive. However in our response, we have identified the issues in the context of the Data Protection Act 1998 so readers can see what the main problems are. There should be an extension of the Accessible Records definition to include employment records so that manual information on employees gain full protection from the Act. This would close an obvious loophole at a time when public and