Here is an interesting development in privacy law. The High Court of England and Wales has confirmed the existence of a new Tort, the tort of misuse of private information. In the case of Vidal-Hall & Ors v Google Inc [2014] EWHC 13 (QB), a group of users have sued Read more…
[Text of a presentation I gave before a screening of The Lives of Others at Wolfson College, Oxford]. Although I am nowadays more interested in IP issues, I started my academic life as a privacy lawyer. My first publications dealt with something called Habeas Data, an obscure constitutional right that Read more…
Imagine a world where there is a secret society with the capacity of listening into all sort of private communications all the time. This organisation has managed to build backdoors into hardware that allows them to check on sensitive data throughout the world seemingly at the click of a button. Read more…
So far, the most serious report to arise from the NSA files has been the revelation that US authorities have been involved in a systematic program to defeat Internet encryption. By any objective measure, the revelations are astounding: intelligence agencies have been building backdoors into cryptographic technology by tampering with Read more…
Since September 11, 2001, whenever I was visiting or passing through the United States, I have been subjected to more “random” security checks than could ever be expected by chance alone. Similarly, I have come to expect to be stopped by the Immigration officers about 50% of the time. The Read more…
Do you remember the time when important events were described by journalists, re-enacted by actors, or retold by witnesses? Lucky snapshots were rare, and viral videos and citizen journalism were alien concepts. Now we are increasingly presented with pictures that give us every angle of an explosion, CCTV cameras catching Read more…
Imagine a device that records your location at all times, that can be used to take videos and pictures of any event and upload it to social media with little concern for privacy of the subjects. Were you thinking of Google Glass? I was actually thinking of the worse threat Read more…
Privacy is dead. There is no such thing as privacy. We are all under constant, unending, crushing surveillance. Depressed? You should be. This is the powerful conclusion reached by security guru Bruce Schneier in this brilliant op-ed for CNN. Schneier writes: “The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit Read more…
Some years ago I accompanied a friend to a radio station, where he was going to get interviewed about a show. Just before the interview, we were asked by one of the producers if we wanted coffee, and I replied “Yes, can I have a black coffee please?” She looked Read more…
The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has released a report on the possible implementation of the right to be forgotten. “The right to be forgotten” is one of the elements of the new proposed regulation (January 2012) on data protection of the European Commission. The right allows people Read more…