Let’s play a quick game of spot the odd one out. On Monday 12th February the German Consumer Federation announced it had won a fairly significant court case against Facebook. The court found that Facebook collects and uses personal data without providing enough information to its members for them to render meaningful consent. The federation…
October Roundup
On and on and on the Public Services Card rolls despite almost all the wheels having fallen off, even the mandatory but not compulsory wheels that have been hastily repaired and reapplied to the shambling mess as it drags itself from pothole to ditch to pothole. The potholes and ditches in this case are rules,…
September Roundup
Autumn roared in. The Public Services Card rolled on despite one minister admitting in a roundabout way that there is no legal basis for what’s currently happening and another cooing softly that the thing which should have been done before the project started many years ago will certainly be done “very soon”. Massive amounts of…
August Roundup
August was a busy month as the already cracked veneer on the surface of the Irish state’s shambolic data acquisition and sharing projects shattered further. We were treated to a senior government minister denying she was splitting hairs while attempting a precision distinction between ‘mandatory’ and ‘compulsory’. Elsewhere it was (bad) business as usual for…
The Knowledge Gap [KitBits 17.11]
I was prompted to write this post, which had been rolling around the back of my head for quite some time, by this series of tweets by Simon McGarr. Do read them all. Privacy and data protection is not a dry legal issue, nor an incomprehensible technical thing best left to boffins. Data protection at…
End The Wordplay [KitBits 17.10]
The Irish Times reports this morning that a woman in her 70s has had her pension payments stopped because she refused to get the State’s certainly-not-mandatory Public Services Card and add herself to the national biometric identity register which the State is definitely not building. No doubt some ministers and officials in the departments of…
July Roundup
Please ensure you’re sitting comfortably folks as this was quite a month, both at home and abroad. 1. The Central Statistics Office Really Wants To Track You In one of the stranger privacy stories we’ve yet seen in this country, the Irish Times reported that the Central Statistics Office desperately wanted to build a comprehensive…
Just Some Light Tracking? That Could Cost You [KitBit 17.9]
The folks making sweeping wrongheaded decisions about large amounts of personal data gathering, storage and manipulation often appear to forget what’s behind the additional rows they want in their database to make their lives easier. People are behind the rows. Data is not the new oil, or any other natural resource analogy you can find in…
You Want To Do What Now? [KitBits 17.8]
As reported in the Irish Times by Elaine Edwards on Monday, the Irish Central Statistics Office has spent the best part of the last decade attempting to get its hands on mobile telephone data from visitors to the state and Irish travellers abroad, despite being told, essentially, to please stop by the office of the…
June Roundup
Unfortunately there was quite an amount of data daftness on display last month. 1. EU Proposes to Mandate end-to-end encryption; UK still trying to break it In May the US Senate approved the use of encrypted messaging app Signal for staff. A European Parliament committee followed suit in June in a draft proposal “that will enforce end-to-end…