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…

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…

The Whys And Wherefores Of An Identity Register [KitBits 17.7]

The Stream on Al Jazeera covered the Indian government’s Aadhaar identity system yesterday. Get yourself a hot or cold beverage and devote half an hour of your time to this. As you watch it, here are some things to note in the context of the Irish government’s determination to push ahead with their voluntary-but-to-all-intents-and-purposes-mandatory Public Services…

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…