For avoidance of doubt, I created this video – or rather I wrote the subtitles to add to the original. It’s a parody based on the great movie Downfall, and follows a whole series of parodies made over the years… Paul Bernal UPDATE: I wrote a blog about why I created this parody … Continue reading Tim Kelsey discovers care.data is in trouble…
The latest piece of health data news, that, according to the Telegraph, the hospital records of all NHS patients have been sold to insurers, is a body-blow to the care.data scheme, but make no mistake about it, the scheme was already in deep trouble. Last week’s news that the scheme had been delayed for six months … Continue reading Care.data and the community…
The saga of the UK’s contact tracing app has barely begun but already it is fraught with problems. Technical problems – the app barely works on iPhones, for example, and communication between iPhones requires someone with an Android phone to be in close proximity – are just the start of it. Legal problems are another … Continue reading Contact tracing, privacy, magical thinking – and trust!
My new book, the Internet, Warts and All, has just been published. The subtitle – Free Speech, Privacy and Truth – gives and indication of its subject matter and scope: this is a wide-ranging, broad-brush book covering a great variety of different subjects, from some of the theoretical background to free speech, privacy and truth … Continue reading The Internet, Warts and All: Free Speech, Privacy and Truth
The story of Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind took a not-unexpected turn this week when the ICO ruled that the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust failed to comply with the Data Protection Act when it provided patient details to DeepMind. This is the latest step in a saga that looks set to rumble on for some time … Continue reading Listen to the privacy geeks…
I was introduced to Dave Eggers’ novel, The Circle, by Professor Andrew Murray – one of the pre-eminent scholars in IT Law in the UK, and also on of my PhD supervisors. I know I’m very late to this game – the book came out in 2013, and all the cool people will already have … Continue reading Dave Eggers’ The Circle: a book for our times…
The repercussions of yesterday’s landmark ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union that the Data Retention Directive is invalid, and has been so since its inception are likely to be complex and wide-ranging. Lawyers, academics, politicians and activists have been reading, writing, thinking and speculating about what might happen. With the directive … Continue reading Data Retention: taking privacy seriously
The importance of privacy is often downplayed. It sometimes seems as though privacy is viewed as something bad, something inherently selfish, something that ‘good’ people don’t need or really want – or at the very least are willing to sacrifice for the greater good. To me, that displays a fundamental misunderstanding of privacy and of … Continue reading Privacy isn’t selfish…
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