[SPOILERS] After languishing for more than a year in my “to read” pile, I finally got around to reading The Circle by David Eggers. This is an important, yet flawed book, and while I loved many of the concepts and loathed the dystopian present that it describes, I believe that […]
I have been thinking about augmented reality a lot in the last few days for reasons explained in the last blog post. While most of the discussion in the next few weeks will be about cute pocket monsters, an interesting legal question has arisen, who owns virtual spaces around real […]
Andres Guadamuz, University of Sussex For the last couple of years, journalist Dune Lawrence has been subject to constant harassment. She wrote several articles about an investment firm, and the owner initiated an online defamation campaign against her and other targets. He posted images of her to his website and […]
The European Commission has finally published the text of the programme called Privacy Shield, the name of the agreement reached with the United States to safeguard the export of personal data from European citizens across the Atlantic. This is in response to the CJEU case of Maximiliam Schrems v Data […]
The history of Internet Law is littered with bad legislation and legislative proposals. From the infamous SOPA and PIPA, to the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill, there is no shortage of badly-conceived legislation dealing with the Internet. Sometimes the bad law is the result of powerful lobbying, sometimes it is caused […]
One of the most long-lasting effects of Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 was that they presented strong evidence that national security agencies in the US and the UK were involved in serious indiscriminate mass surveillance programmes. Furthermore, one of the most revealing aspects was the fact that some of these […]
The Court of Justice of the European Union has produced a landmark decision in Maximillian Schrems v Data Protection Commissioner (C‑362/14). The ruling may have huge economic and political repercussions for the tech industry in the next months. This is a case that requires some context if you are unfamiliar […]
The High Court of Justice has declared s1 of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 to be unlawful and contrary to European Law. The article in question is part of emergency surveillance legislation enacted last year by the coalition government. The Court was responding to a judicial review […]
My social media timeline has been inundated in the last week with headlines warning that Whatsapp is about to be banned in the UK by the government. The UK’s mainstream media knows a good scandal when it sees one, and therefore it has picked up the story issuing hysterical headlines […]
An open letter to all members of the House of Commons, Dear Parliamentarian, Ensuring the Rule of Law and the democratic process is respected as UK surveillance law is revised Actions Taken Under the Previous Government During the past two years, the United Kingdom’s surveillance laws and policies have come […]