techno-culture

It’s been a loooong time coming, but 50 nations reached agreement last week on basic draft guidelines for ensuring some degree of data protection and data privacy. The Spanish Data Protection Commissioner organised the conference which seems to have had significant buy-in — the US was there as was Google and Facebook (the latter being [...]

The New York Times flags Britain’s status as a leading surveillance state — bottom of the league in a Privacy International privacy survey. I don’t know if that situation has actually ‘rankled’ most Britons, as the article suggests. Many privacy invasions don’t seem to bother us much in Ireland, either. Still: But the intrusions visited [...]

TD Sean Sherlock released this press release earlier today following the first day of debate on the data retention bill. These are key issues: the cost burden, the length of retention, and lack of judicial oversight. Speaking in the Dáil today on the Communications (Retention of Data) Bill 2009, Deputy Sean Sherlock said: “This is [...]

Tags: data retention bill, labour party, sean sherlock

I was amused but not terribly surprised at the Irish telecoms industry’s angry riposte (scroll to second letter) to my column last week which revealed how they have been privately working out, in discussions with the Garda (Irish police), Revenue service and Irish Defense Forces, how they all plan to interpret an as-yet non-existent data [...]

The Guardian has an extraordinary and depressing lead story on the front page today. In it, Sir David Ormond, the former head of security and intelligence at Whitehall, outlines his view that the privacy of the masses must be sacrificed for greater security against terrorism and that we will all just have to get used to huge [...]

Tags: data retention, privacy

I’ve posted my story on this leaked bill below, but if anyone is interested in some light reading, Digital Rights Ireland has posted the full bill. Meanwhile, yesterday the European Court of Justice upheld data retention… sort of. It wasn’t really deciding on the substantive issue of retention but rather responding to a challenge as to how the EU [...]

Tags: data retention, Digital Rights Ireland, ireland, privacy

From the front page of the Irish Times today. This is a truly appalling bill designed as a sop to privacy and business concerns while actually providing no safeguards at all. Another cynical approach to data retention legislation by the Department of Justice. New Bill will allow data obtained outside legal guidelines to be used [...]

Tags: data retention, ireland, Ivana Bacik, privacy

This is very good news. Now will the others follow suit? Yahoo said Wednesday that it would limit to 90 days the time it holds some personally identifiable information related to searches to address growing concerns from privacy advocates, policy makers and government regulators. Yahoo’s new data retention policy is the most restrictive among major [...]

Tags: data retention, Yahoo

Slashdotted this month, and I didn’t even know at the time, as the direct link was to my Irish Times story. Ooooohhhh what geek girl doesn’t love a good /. every now and then…  I think this is about my third or fourth, over many years, so they are rare enough. Typical that the topic, [...]

Declan McCullagh has an interesting post about Obama VP-pick Joe Biden’s record on the tech front. Not great — he came in near the bottom of C/Net’s ‘technology voter’s guide’. Seems the anti-privacy legislation he pushed was directly responsible for PGP, for which thanks, kind of… Biden’s bill — and the threat of encryption being [...]

Today’s leader in the Irish Times (written by me ): IF ANY doubts remained about the urgent need for a national data disclosure law, they will have been banished by the revelation that the Comptroller and Auditor General’s office failed to disclose – for 16 months – the theft of a laptop which included personal [...]

The Guardian has a worrying piece this morning about a university research project in Bath that tracks the movement of people using Bluetooth. While the research itself is seemingly benign — even, arguably, beneficial, says the researcher in this blog post – the notion that millions of people can potentially be easily tracked in this way — and that [...]