At Jisc’s Learning Analytics Network meeting last month I presented an updated version of my suggested legal model for Learning Analytics. The new version adds the data collection stage(s) and seems to me – both as a sometime system developer and privacy-sensitive student – to provide the kinds of guidance, choices and protections that I’d […]
According to Parliament’s website, “outstanding issues on the [Investigatory Powers] Bill were resolved on 16th November“. The Bill now passes to its final formal stage, Royal Assent, after which it will be the Investigatory Powers Act. Although the final text won’t be published till that happens, the Parliamentary stages don’t seem to have made any […]
Although the Information Commissioner’s “Twelve Steps to Prepare” is an excellent guide to what organisations need to do in the eighteen months before the General Data Protection Regulation becomes UK law in May 2018, following them in order from 1 to 12 may not be the best approach. Some of the steps depend on the […]
The recent European Court case of Breyer v Germany provides welcome support for those who wish to protect the security of on-line services. The case concerned two questions – whether a website’s logfiles (typically containing time, client IP address, URL requested and result) constituted personal data and, if so, whether data protection law allowed the […]
Abstract: Reconciling big data techniques with a legal approach relying on prior consent has proved difficult. By definition, when organisations collection personal information for data-led investigations they do not know what the results and impact of their processing will be. This paper suggests how other parts of the current European data protection framework can provide […]
On the recent trial run of our new course on Filtering and Monitoring we invited students to discuss the Home Office requirement to “consider the use of filters as part of their overall strategy to prevent people being drawn into terrorism“. HEFCE’s recent update of their monitoring framework for Higher Education providers in England asks […]
The Board of European Regulators of Electronic Communications (BEREC) have now released the final version of their net neutrality guidelines, following a public consultation that received nearly half a million responses. These seem to have resulted in clarifications of the draft version, rather than any significant change of policy. Jisc’s response raised a concern that […]
The latest announcement from the Article 29 Working Party on the US-EU Privacy Shield also suggests that there shouldn’t be any short-term surprises for those using the other justifications for exporting personal data to the USA. The European Court judgment that invalidated the Safe Harbor agreement in 2015 was concerned, among other things, with the […]
[UPDATE: the Directive has now been published, with Member States required to transpose it into their national laws by 9 May 2018] The European Council has published the text of the Network and Information Security Directive recently agreed by its representatives and those of the European Parliament. This still needs to be “technically finalised” (in […]
Now that the General Data Protection Regulation has been completed, the European Commission is reviewing the ePrivacy Directive. This law was introduced in 2002 as part of the telecommunications framework, and it was recognised at the time that it was likely to be largely replaced by a future general privacy law. That has taken longer […]