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Category: data retention

Taxing and woolly data retention laws will discourage new business – The Irish Times – Fri, Apr 15, 2011

15 April, 2011
| No Comments
| data retention, General

KARLIN LILLINGTON

The cost and complexity of new data legislation creates difficulties for new investors

AS THE implications of our recently enacted data retention legislation sink in, internet service providers – defined broadly – are beginning to express concern.

The Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011, signed into law in January, does not merely target telecoms companies or conventional ISPs, say legal experts. Operators of cyber cafes, and any hotel or hostel that offers internet access to customers, are likely to fall under its remit.

Handlers of internet and e-mail data – including those who operate data warehouses – may now have obligations to store user data under this Act. Even people who run internet discussion boards fall into a grey area, depending on how they manage e-mail services for board members.

Data handlers must not only store, but maintain and manage data in such a way as to make it quickly accessible to law-enforcement agencies upon request and – in a move that has been questioned by privacy advocates such as Digital Rights Ireland – the Revenue service.

Doing so will generally involve software, employee and hardware costs. These could prove crippling to smaller service providers and cause hotels to question whether to offer internet access at all.

…

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Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?

30 January, 20113 February, 2011
| 4 Comments
| data retention, Privacy

A cartoon for the week which saw both international data privacy day and the enactment of the Communications (Retention of Data) Act, 2011 (No 3 of 2011, not yet available on pdf, but see the Oireachtas site for the Bill; update: noted here by Rossa McMahon), via philosophyblog:

Privacy cartoon, via Philosophy blog

Woman behind shower curtain: Hey! What about my privacy?
Peeping eye: They say that people who worry about their privacy have something to hide …



Earlier posts of mine on this topic: The innocent have nothing to hide? | Traffic Data Retention, Irish-style, returns to the legislative agenda | Nothing to hide?…

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Beware of gullible politicos tinkering with data privacy – Karlin Lillington the in Irish Times

28 January, 2011
| No Comments
| data retention, General, Privacy

Today is international data privacy day, and It’s a shame we do so little to mark the event

WITH THE Seanad passing the data retention – oops, communications – Bill without amendment last week, and Data Protection Commissioner Billy Hawkes warning political parties on Monday that they are not to illegally use (again, for some) unsolicited text messages, calls or emails in the looming election, how ironically appropriate that today is International Data Privacy and Data Protection Day.

via irishtimes.com
…

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Setting tone from the Top | The DOBlog

7 January, 2011
| No Comments
| data retention, General, Privacy

“Privacy by Design” is becoming the mantra of Data Protection enforcement world wide. Simply cutting and pasting a solution from another jurisdiction into an Irish or EU context invites breaches of legislation and failures of the required governance and controls. This is not just a technology issue.

Given that politicians are asking us to trust them, they should ensure that they take the necessary steps to earn that trust. Just like any other organisation embracing new technologies, they must ensure that the necessary due diligence and governance structures are in place to ensure that they are acting in compliance with long established legislation. If they are promoting a “tough on regulation” policy platform, then they must lead with a clear “tone from the top” of Compliance and good Governance.

via obriend.info
…

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Traffic Data Retention, Irish-style, returns to the legislative agenda

13 July, 2009
| 4 Comments
| data retention, Digital Rights, ECHR, ECJ

AC Grayling book cover, via BloomsburyThe Communications (Retention of Data) Bill 2009, published last week, has caused a bit of a stir in this morning‘s newspapers. It will give effect to EU Data Retention Directive 2006/24/EC of 15 March 2006 (blogged here) which recently survived challenge by the Irish Government in the European Court of Justice, and it will replace the radically misconceived and deeply flawed stop-gap Part 7 of the Criminal Justice (Terrorist Offences) Act, 2005 (also here) (blogged here).

In essence, the Bill requires telecommunications companies, internet service providers, and the like, to retain data about communications (though not the content of the communications); phone and mobile traffic data have to be retained for 2 years; internet communications have to be retained for one year. This is better than it could have been, in that the Directive would have allowed 2 years for all traffic data; but it is a lot worse than the minimum of 6 months allowed by the Directive. This will impose significant costs on those obliged to retain and secure the data, and those costs will be passed on to their already hard-pressed customers. And it is likely to drive international telecommunications and internet companies to European states which have introduced far less demanding regimes.…

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The power of letters

24 February, 2009
| 1 Comment
| Censorship, Conferences, Lectures, Papers and Workshops, data retention, Human Rights

Front page of today's Guardian, via the Guardian's siteShami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties), has an editorial letter published in today’s Guardian which begins:

Sir – 75 years ago today, in a Britain strained by economic crisis and social unrest, and in the long shadow of international conflict, the birth of the National Council for Civil Liberties was announced in a letter to this newspaper.

Little has changed. As is reported elsewhere in the same edition, students from the University College London Student Human Rights Programme, have prepared a report setting out the current assaults on liberty in the UK, under the suitably Orwellian title of The Abolition of Freedom Act 2009. It was prepared for this weekend’s forthcoming Convention on Modern Liberty (organised by the UK’s leading human rights campaigners, including Liberty and the Guardian) and it makes for chilling reading.

The situation is equally as grim in Ireland. Today’s Irish Times carries an article by Elaine Byrne on a forthcoming report prepared by her for Transparency International on serious shortcomings which have weakened the quality of Ireland’s democracy. The same edition carries an article on the financial costs associated with the forthcoming data retention regime being challenged by Digitial Rights Ireland.…

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Data retention ironies

10 February, 200924 February, 2009
| 3 Comments
| data retention, Digital Rights, ECJ, EU media policy, Privacy

I can’t make up my mind whether it’s ironic or not that the European Court of Justice has upheld the Data Retention Directive on Safer Internet Day.

I’ll let Digital Rights Ireland tell the story:

European Court upholds data retention… for the time being

The European Court of Justice has given its decision today in the Irish Government challenge to the Data Retention Directive – [Case C-301/06] Ireland v. Parliament and Council (Press Release | Judgment). Unsurprisingly (in light of the Advocate General’s Opinion) it has held that the directive was properly adopted as an internal market measure (by qualified majority voting) rather than as a criminal matter (requiring unanimity). Where does this leave us and our case?

While it’s a pity to see the Directive upheld, the Government’s challenge was a very narrow one, dealing only with the essentially technical matter of the legal basis for the Directive. The Government didn’t raise and the ECJ wasn’t asked to decide on the fundamental rights issues. Indeed it expressly stated:

The Court notes at the outset that the action brought by Ireland relates solely to the choice of legal basis and not to any possible infringement by the directive of fundamental rights resulting from interference with the exercise of the right to privacy.

…

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Google and Privacy: the facts speak for themselves

10 September, 200823 November, 2010
| 2 Comments
| data retention, Privacy

image via Battelle mediaFrom the BBC (hat tip also to Canadian Privacy Law Blog; advance warning from The Register):

Google is to halve the amount of time it stores users’ personal search data in response to continued pressure from the EU over its privacy policy. The search giant has said it will anonymise identifiable IP addresses on its server logs after nine months. Google said respecting users’ privacy is “fundamental to earning and keeping their trust”.

From the Official Google blog (cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog): …

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Hi there! Thanks for dropping by. I’m Eoin O’Dell, and this is my blog: Cearta.ie – the Irish for rights.


“Cearta” really is the Irish word for rights, so the title provides a good sense of the scope of this blog.

In general, I write here about private law, free speech, and cyber law; and, in particular, I write about Irish law and education policy.


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