IP addresses: Personal Data?
Tomás F. Serna
February 26, 2008
There has been some debate lately at this side of the Atlantic on whether IP addresses should be considered as personal data.
The EU Civil Liberties Committee recently held a hearing on various issues surrounding privacy on the Internet, where apparently this one surfaced as key amongst the different that were reviewed.
For some interesting background on what IP addresses are, as well as privacy issues surrounding them I’ll refer you to this post that was published on Feb. 22nd. on Google’s Public Policy blog. While the post is slightly biased -which is only natural and was to be expected-, it still contains useful information as well as some nice discussion on the comments section that certainly provide for a very interesting read.
This debate is taking place at EU institutions while in some member states such as Spain, the national regulator long time ago established its own criteria on the subject matter. In short, and as far as Spain is concerned, IP addresses are to be regarded as personal data. (1) (more…)
Google and Privacy. They had it coming.
Tomás F. Serna
May 29, 2007
The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party –an advisory panel of data-protection chiefs from the 27 countries in the EU–, sent a letter last week to Google demanding an explanation on their recently announced policy of retaining data on search habits from individuals for a period of up to two years.
Google has always garnered lots of attention. That is probably very good for business purposes, but it is certainly a bad thing in the data protection arena.
Why? Because on the one hand EU authorities seem to lately have a thing for the limelight… and on the other hand our current data protection laws weren’t really designed to address the challenges that transnational corporations face. (Let alone corporations with a global scope…) –Any lawyer dealing with high tech companies or at least with transnational mergers involving companies from any industry in the EU will confirm this before you are able to pronounce ‘data protection fine’.– (more…)
Why are we giving the US such a hard time on ‘data protection’ grounds?
Tomás F. Serna
February 2, 2007
There is no need to resort to a legal scholar to obtain a general grasp upon the overall different approaches towards ‘privacy’ both from the EU and the US perspectives.
We, Europeans, seem to be very wary towards perceived potential threats to the ‘fundamental right’ to privacy. Thus, Directive 95/46 saw the light, the European Data Protection Supervisor was created, as well as many ‘national regulators’ among the different European member states. In Spain furthermore, we have a number of ‘local’ sub-state public data protection authorities.
And by the way, the most exquisite ‘administrative law’ (public), resolutions and readings that I have come across in my professional life, came from both the Spanish national one: the ‘Agencia Española de Protección de Datos’, as well as from the ‘Agencia de Protección de Datos de la Comunidad de Madrid‘, (Madrid’s local one). (Credit where credit is due: the Spanish CMT deserves a golden honorific mention here too.) I think most lawyers would agree with me on this one.
Contrary to popular belief, the US approach is not a careless one. (more…)
Time was ticking…
Tomás F. Serna
October 3, 2006
I recall it being on or around September 25th. that I had a few lines written down on a post that was going to be titled: “Time is ticking…”
I thought that this matter had such a high importance, that an announcement over an agreement between the US and the EU was to surface any minute on those dates, and thus my humble post remained unpublished on my computer watching the days go by.
Time was ticking –at the time–, towards the September 30th deadline established by ECJ decision of May 30th. 2006 regarding the international data transfers of ‘Passenger Name Records’ (PNR), between European airlines and the US Government, as discussed on an earlier post in BlogEuropa.eu.
Privacy advocates rejoice! or not…?
Tomás F. Serna
June 13, 2006
Had you scanned through the recent headlines on privacy issues and noticed about the recent Court of Justice of the European Communities judgment on the 2004 EU-US agreement over personal data transfers from EU based airline companies to the US Government –but weren’t provided with or didn’t stop to read the fine print–, you’d think that this could mean a victory for so-called privacy advocates…
Well, in that case, you’d had to think again.