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…

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…

February Roundup

This month it’s mostly about data ending up in rather places it has no business being. 1. Weaponised Information In The Bay Area This month the great and good of the world of information security gathered for their annual knees-up, the RSA Conference in San Francisco. This was, of course, shortly after the inauguration of…

November Roundup

If you plan on spending any time in the UK in the near future, do be aware that staff of the Postal Services Commission will be able to look at everything you’ve been browsing on the Web. No, that’s not a somewhat strange hypothetical situation constructed to make you think a bit about digital privacy,…

August Roundup

Highlights. Or perhaps lowlights, if you will. 1. How Much For A Phone Number? The biggest story of the month was that Facebook finally got around to cracking open the piggybank of personal data it splashed out nineteen billion on last year. In other words, connecting WhatsApp user data with Facebook user data. Despite denying…