Shamrock Information Security

Privacy Shield

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The niner noteworthy stories of 2017 (week 31)

These are the noteworthy stories, in no particular order, that peaked my interest for this week.

Click here to find out why

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The niner noteworthy stories of 2017 (week 24)

These are the noteworthy stories, in no particular order, that peaked my interest for this week.

Click here to find out why

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The niner noteworthy stories of 2017 (week 9)

These are the noteworthy stories, in no particular order, that peaked my interest last week.

Click here to find out why

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The niner noteworthy and the 12 recaps of 2016 (day 10)

Except for one article, all others deal with data protection and privacy laws related to the European Union. Not too surprising as the general data protection regulation and the EU/US privacyshield have been dominating the privacy news over the last year.
Apart from those major topics I will be looking at how Florida is handling data from citizens with a drivers license as well as what the Donald may have in store for cross-atlantic data transfers.
besides this, there are already some pointers to the semi-final instalment of this series which will focus on online surveillance.

In chronological order:

Click here to continue reading

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The niner noteworthy and the 12 recaps of 2016 (day 9)

Privacy professionals

are all lawyers

, at least that is a one-liner I have heard often enough from people within the International Association of Privacy Professionals. And yes I’m somewhat irritated about that statement.
Data protection has, if lawyers like it or not, a very large technical aspect that if not taken care of will mean that their legal work means absolutely nothing for the privacy protection of our society.
In this instalment I will be looking at data protection from a technology point of view including: the privacy aware usage of drones, biometric voice prints and how a piece of software can render them useless, health data in the hands of one of the biggest privacy violators on the web, fitness bands and their privacy impact, issues with Apple iMessage and iCloud syncing of call data.
But the legal site has it’s place too in this 12 recaps series.
Check out day 10: Legal privacy, here.

In chronological order:

Click here to continue reading

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EU/US Privacyshield: one common goal but 180 degree difference in vision

We are registering the start of this century when social media more or less didn’t exist yet, nobody heard of big data and Edward Snowden was still a young man.
At that time it wasn’t hard to see how the European Union and the USA made a gentlemen’s agreement on the processing of personal information in the USA even though the country offered a privacy protection level nowhere close to becoming adequate according to European privacy laws (data protection directive 95/46/EC) on the promise they would behave themselves and companies could be trusted with a self-certification system on which the American FTC (Federal Trade Commission) would keep a close eye. They called it “safe harbour” which lasted for around 15 years.

The adequacy of American data protection hasn’t changed in all these years and with the expected growing protection against unlawful data processing only increasing in the GDPR it will not change in the favour of the American views on privacy anytime soon either.
So why is the privacy shield more a cloak than a protective measure?
Read my analyses here