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…

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…

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…

May Roundup

This month there’s a fair bit about advertising and the power which combining disparate buckets of information about you offers to the world’s advertising companies, large and small. The Irish state’s continued quest to issue three million biometric-capable identity cards it signed a contract for without explaining why it thinks these cards are needed is…

April Roundup

This month brings some revealing peeks behind a few data curtains and an exploration of the soft soothing language of sharing with partners and keeping it all in the family (of companies). 1. Facial Recognition, As It’s Happening We’re essentially building an IT backbone, which can allow TSA or potentially air carriers or any other…

March Roundup

Join us, gentle readers, on a short adventure in which we compare and contrast the approaches and abilities of two neighbouring data protection authorities, visit a data protection summit sponsored and launched by the Minister for Data Protection which didn’t have a privacy policy and hear about the privacy concerns of the inventor of the…

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…