Many of the problems in applying European Data Protection Law on-line arise from uncertainty over whether the law covers labels that allow an individual to be recognised (i.e. “same person as last time”) but not – unless you are the issuer of the label – identified (i.e. “Andrew again”). The Article 29 Working Party have […]
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Thoughts on regulatory and ethical issues relating to the use of technology in education and research
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Cookies – *now* it’s time to wake up
The Information Commissioner has published his guidance on complying with new European cookie law, and the news is less good than had been hoped. Although the simplest way for a website to obtain users’ consent to installing cookies would be to rely on them having set appropriate cookie preferences in their browsers – indeed the […]
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IPv6 helps cloud routing
Matt Cook’s talk at Networkshop explained Loughborough University’s thinking on how virtualisation might be used to provide both resilience and flexibility by allowing services to be moved between different locations in both internal and external clouds. Rather than virtualising a single server, this involves creating a virtual container holding the various components required to deliver […]
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Cookies – Better Browsers Required
A press release from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport confirms that the Government is looking to browser manufacturers to provide the main approach to implementing new European laws on cookies. However the release also confirms that current tools for managing cookies in browsers are not considered sufficient to obtain the consent that will […]
An interesting news item from SWITCH, the Swiss NREN and also operator of the .ch and .li TLD registries, on how they are alerting website owners to malware and, if necessary, taking action to protect customers from being infected. Swiss law allows the registry to suspend a domain for five days, or longer if the […]
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IWF Annual Report 2010
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published its annual report yesterday, including information on the use of the Internet to distribute indecent images of children. There is quite a lot of good news to report. These images remain a very small fraction of Internet content – fewer than 9000 dealt with all year and only around […]
Nominet have published an issues paper asking whether there are circumstances in which it might be appropriate to rapidly suspend a DNS domain involved in criminal activity, and the processes that would be needed to ensure such action did not create too great a risk of unfairness. I’m writing this in an attempt to sort […]
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Cookie law – time to act?
The Information Commissioner managed to greatly raise the profile of the new EU law on cookies last week, warning in a press release that “UK businesses must wake-up” to the forthcoming change. However this alarm bell seems to be a bit early, as the Government admitted that although it does expect to meet the deadline […]
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OFCOM to Review DEA Blocking Powers
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has today announced that Ofcom will be asked to review the practicality of the provisions in section 17 of the Digital Economy Act 2010 that might in future allow courts to order blocking of infringing sites. In our responses to previous consultations on the Act we have expressed […]
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MoJ Data Protection Response
An interesting morning yesterday at the launch of the Ministry of Justice’s Response to the Call for Evidence on the Current Data Protection Legislative Framework. JANET’s evidence focussed on the difficulties of applying data protection law to the Internet: the current law has proved unclear on the status of IP addresses and similar pseudonymous identifiers, […]