The European Commission’s proposed update of the Network and Information Security Directive may revive discussions about access to WHOIS data. When a domain name is registered, contact details are typically requested for various purposes, including billing, administrative and technical questions. For most of the history of the DNS this ‘WHOIS’ data – including names, postal […]
We’ve all been trained how to spot phishing emails: check the sender address, hover over links to see where they go, etc. But that’s a lot of work and mental effort. And, given that most emails aren’t phish, almost all wasted. So can we do it better? A fascinating paper by Rick Wash looked at […]
During the pandemic, a lot of ideas have come up – not just contact tracing! – where useful information might be derived from location data. It struck me that a selection of those might be an interesting illustration of how intrusiveness isn’t just about the data we use, but what we use it for. Here’s […]
The latest report on ICO sandbox participation contains a rapid pivot, and some useful discussion of the “public interest” justification for processing. Back in mid-2019, NHS Digital was awarded a sandbox place for a system for recruiting volunteers into clinical trials (the actual conduct of trials is out of scope). A few months into 2020 […]
Tertiary educational institutions have a very specific role in promoting free speech, whether verbal, in writing or on-line. This is set out in general in the Education (No.2) Act 1986, with specific limitations – monitored by the sector regulators – to manage the risk of radicalisation in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 and, for […]
[UPDATE] Recordings from the event are now available David Clark of MIT is one of the best people to take a long view of the Internet: he has been working on it since the 1970s. So his suggestion – in a Weizenbaum Institute Symposium yesterday – that the 2020s may see as dramatic a change […]
The European Data Protection Board (the gathering of all EU Data Protection Regulators) has now published its initial guidance on transfers out of the EEA following the Schrems II case. This recommends that exporting organisations follow a similar roadmap to the earlier one from the European Data Protection Supervisor (who regulates the EU institutions). In […]
Dataguidance is reporting that the German presidency has produced its progress report on the last six months of discussions on the ePrivacy Regulation. Recall that this was supposed to come into force on the same day as the GDPR… And it seems that Member States still haven’t reached agreement on what purposes might justify a […]
It’s still common to hear stories where privacy is supposedly in conflict with other objectives. I’ve been writing for years about how that’s not the case in security or access management. This morning’s ICO webinar on Security and Data Minimisation in Artificial Intelligence came up with a counter-example in that field, too… You might think […]
Two talks at last week’s FIRST conference looked at how Artificial Intelligence might be used in incident response. In both cases, the use of AI improves user privacy directly – by reducing or eliminating the need for human responders to look at user data – and also indirectly, by producing faster detection and mitigation of […]