The Joint Committee on Human Rights has published its conclusions on the Defamation Bill. Among other changes the Bill intends to clarify the position of websites that accept posts from third parties and make it less likely that lawful posts will be removed because of fear of liability. The Committee are “glad to see steps […]
The Joint Committee on the Draft Communications Bill has published its report, concluding that while there is “a case for legislation which will provide the law enforcement agencies with some further access to communications data” the current proposal needs “substantial re-writing”. The Committee address three of the four concerns raised in our Janet evidence. They […]
The Law Commission have published an interesting consultation paper on how the law of contempt of court is affected by the internet. Anything that “tends to interfere with the course of justice” may be considered contempt: the Contempt of Court Act 1981 deals in particular with communications addressed to the public at large or a […]
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New CAP rules on behavioural advertising
The Committee on Advertising Practice (CAP) has announced new rules on online behavioural advertising. UK advertisers will be expected to comply with these rules from 4th February 2013. Unlike the much-discussed cookie law, the CAP rules are technology neutral, concentrating instead on the actions involved in providing on-line adverts that are targeted to individuals’ patterns […]
ENISA’s study on the “Right to be Forgotten” contains useful reminders that once information is published on the Internet it may be impossible to completely remove it. Implementing a right to be forgotten would involve four stages: Identifying and locating the information to be removed; Tracking all copies that may have been made, including unauthorised […]
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EU DP Supervisor on Cloud Computing
A new Opinion of the EU Data Protection Supervisor discusses some of the problems in applying the current Data Protection Directive to public cloud services, and how these might be done better under the proposed Data Protection Regulation. Particular challenges include Although the Directive claims to regulate “transfers” of personal data out of the EEA, […]
Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights has asked for evidence on the Defamation Bill, so I’ve sent in a Janet submission pointing out the human rights issues that could be raised by the Bill. Although the aims of the provisions on websites are to increase the protection of free speech while ensuring that genuinely defamatory […]
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Legal issues in dealing with Botnets
An interesting paper from ENISA and the NATO Cyberdefence Centre illustrates the narrow space that the law allows for incident response, and the importance of ensuring that new laws don’t prevent incident response teams from protecting networks, systems, their users and information against attack. By comparing the details of German and Estonian law, the report […]
A paper on “Economic Tussles in Federated Identity Management” provides some interesting insights into which FIM systems succeed and which fail. A simplistic summary would be that success requires a win-win outcome, where every party (Identity Provider, Service Provider and User) gains some benefit from adopting a federated approach. Viewing federations as a two-sided market […]
An interesting presentation by Giles Hogben of ENISA at TERENA’s CSIRT Task Force meeting in Heraklion last week, looking at security issues when moving to the public cloud computing model.There have been several papers on technical issues such as possible leakage of information between different virtual machines running on the same physical hardware (for example […]