Several years ago, a photo was widely shared on social media showing a CCTV camera outside 22 Portobello Road, George Orwell’s first London home. The image had been created by artist and photographer Steve Ullathorne, as part of his series Restyles of the Dead and Famous, in which he tweaked images of homes of the dead and famous. Here’s the dystopian image as shared:
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I have just conducted a search on a popular search engine for “Seán Quinn”, and the above message – that Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe – appears at the bottom of each page of results. Over the past weekend, there was widespread media coverage of attempts by Seán Quinn to rely on the EU’s right to be forgotten to remove newspaper articles from search listings that highlighted significant aspects of his bankruptcy and of his family’s lavish pre-bankruptcy lifestyle. This attempt at reputation management backfired spectacularly on him, and stands as an example of the Streisand effect, which is:
… a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American singer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew greater attention to it in 2003.
On Saturday, in the Irish Independent, Shane Phelan published the following story:
…Revealed: Quinn family succeeds in campaign to erase press coverage of lavish lifestyle
Google delists dozens of articles on court battles and even €100,000 wedding cake
Members of ex-billionaire Seán Quinn’s family have mounted a successful campaign to have press coverage about their past ‘forgotten’ by Google.
Ross O’Carroll-Kelly is the protagonist and narrator of many novels and a weekly satirical newspaper column in the Irish Times. He is a hugely self-confident South Dublin celtic tiger rugby cub who never grew up; his slightly dippy wife tolerates his legendary foibles and even-more-legendary indiscretions; and his terrible children take daily advantage of his boundless stupidity.
In last week’s column (audio here), he complained that his neighbour was power-washing the patio again, when he’s supposed to be working from home, but he gets away with it, because he gets his wife to move the cursor on his work laptop so it doesn’t go to sleep. Thanks to the pandemic, remote working is here to stay: in January of this year, the Government published its Making Remote Work – National Remote Working Strategy, “to ensure that remote working is a permanent feature in the Irish workplace in a way that maximises economic, social and environmental benefits”. It will create many benefits. For example, in this week’s column, Ross’s two eldest children, Ronan (Ro) (Ross’s illegitimate son, with many criminal connections) and Honor (Ross’s daughter-from-hell), go into the business of monitoring shirking remote-workers, without the need to microchip employees:
…“So,” Honor goes, “a lot of you have, like, businesses, right?
In last year’s birthday wish, I referred to Terry Pratchett’s People’s Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, and Douglas Adams’s Towel Day. The 25th May is also the day on which, in 1977, the first Star Wars movie (later re-titled Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (IMDB)) was released. So, happy birthday GDPR, and may the Force be with you!
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Article 99(2) of Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC (General Data Protection Regulation) provides:
It shall apply from 25 May 2018.
Bonus (1): From the Discworld & Terry Pratchett Wiki:
Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg!
The People’s Revolution of the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May is depicted in Night Watch. … A few streets around Treacle Mine Road were barricaded at first. Soon more people started barricading streets, barricades were moved forward and merged together, covering at least a quarter of the city – including the food industry. The resulting area was called The People’s Republic of Treacle Mine Road. …
Following Terry’s announcement about Alzheimer, calls have been made to wear lilac on the 25th of May as a tribute, and to raise money for Alzheimer research. …
May 25th is also national Geek Pride Day and Towel Day, a day in honour of Douglas Adams. This has led to some fans having to choose between the two, until someone came up with the lilac towel [additional link; possible source].…
The General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 [the GDPR]) provides both for public enforcement by data protection authorities and for private enforcement by any person who has suffered damage as a result of an infringement of the Regulation (on this inter-connection, see Johanna Chamberlain & Jane Reichel “The Relationship Between Damages and Administrative Fines in the EU General Data Protection Regulation” 89 Mississippi Law Journal (forthcoming 2020; SSRN)). As to private enforcement by means of damages claims, Article 82(1) GDPR provides that “[a]ny person who has suffered material or non-material damage as a result of an infringement of this Regulation shall have the right to receive compensation from the controller or processor for the damage suffered”. CMS legal are tracking fines levied by data protection authorities in the EU – they record that, so far, 186 fines have been levied, for a total of almost €460m (the EDPB gives different numbers (pdf, pp33-34), discussed here). However, there is as yet no equivalent tracker for compensation claims, in part because there have been very few. So far as I can find, there have been eight judgments considering substantive claims for damages pursuant to Article 82 (though there have been other cases in which such compensation was claimed but the substantive issue was not reached).…
On Tuesday of this week, belatedly and with very bad grace, the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection published the Report of the Data Protection Commission (DPC) on the Public Services Card (#PSC), which concluded that the government’s implementation of the PSC infringed data protection legislation. The government has refused to accept or comply with the Commission’s findings, and has instead, for reasons beyond understanding, gone to war with the DPC on this issue.
In my view, the Government’s unjustified defiance of the DPC imperils Ireland’s tech reputation; and I argue in an OpEd in today’s Sunday Business Post (sub req’d) (update: you can download it from the links in update 3 below) that this unseemly standoff must be resolved as quickly as possible, before irreversible damage is done to our international standing as a good location in which international tech companies can establish their European headquarters:
…Dealing from bottom of the deck on the Public Services Card
The government is clinging to its legal advice on the PSC data fiasco. It needs to admit it was wrong and change course immediately
… The DPC’s report is very clear; its fundamental conclusions will undoubtedly survive legal challenge; and the government will eventually be as surely taken to task in the courts in Dublin and Luxembourg as it has been his week in the court of public opinion.
At the end of last week, the media was full of stories that Google had been “Fined $170 Million for Violating Children’s Privacy on YouTube” (that’s a headline from the New York Times; see also, for example, NPR | BBC | RTÉ | Silicon Republic). In this post, I want to sketch the legal background to, and consequences of, this fine; and, at the end, I will say a few words about the equivalent position in Europe.
In the US, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (15 USC §§ 6501–6506; hereafter: COPPA), and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (16 CFR § 312; hereafter: the COPPA Rule) made under it, regulate unfair and deceptive acts and practices in connection with the collection and use of personal information from and about children on the internet. In particular, 15 USC §§ 6502(b)(A) COPPA, and 16 CFR § 312.3 COPPA Rule, require the operator of any website or online service directed to children that collects personal information from children, or the operator of a website or online service that has actual knowledge that it is collecting personal information from a child,
(i) to provide notice on the website of what information is collected from children by the operator, how the operator uses such information, and the operator’s disclosure practices for such information; and
(ii) to obtain verifiable parental consent for the collection, use, or disclosure of personal information from children; …
Giving further effect to the second paragraph here, 16 CFR § 312.5(b)(1) COPPA Rule provides
…An operator must make reasonable efforts to obtain verifiable parental consent, taking into consideration available technology.
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