Ethics & Law of Information

A category dealing with the ethics and legalities of the management of Information and Information Quality.

Newspaper Licensing Ireland– some thoughts

This post is about the website of Newspaper Licensing Ireland, who have recently written to a non-profit organisation whose aims I wholeheartedly support, seeking license fees for linking to newspaper content published on the internet by the newspaper publishers. McGarr Solicitors, who are acting for Women’s Aid, have published a detailed analysis of the situation …

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New rules, Old roots, Old attitudes

So, today the European Commission is announcing new rules for Data Protection and Privacy in the EU (and the EEA countries and those countries seeking accession to the EU). There is hype and hoopla about the rules and what they mean, particularly for organisations conducting business on-line, companies based outside the EU selling into the …

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics

On Monday the 16th January 2012 the Irish Examiner ran a story that purported to have found that 93% of the Irish public “decried” the decision of the Minister for Foreign Affairs to close Ireland’s embassy in the Vatican City State. The article detailed how they had undertaken a review of correspondence released under the …

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Household Charge Data Protection: Part 4 – The Circle of Trust

Phil Hogan has stated on RTE news that the problems with the Privacy Statement have been fixed. They haven’t (and for record purposes I’ve taken a PDF copy of the current Privacy Statement to track future evolutions). The problem with not complying with Google’s Terms and Conditions has been fixed. The problems with: Lack of …

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The Household Charge Data Protection Kerfuffle (Part 2)

I don’t normally blog twice in day but I also don’t like to write 40000 word blog posts. So here is part 2 of the post I wrote earlier (with thanks to @brianhonan for pointing out some stuff on the twitterbox). Data Retention The Privacy Statement for HouseholdCharge.ie states that The Local Government (Household Charge) …

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Household Charge–A Data Protection kerfuffle in the making?

It’s time for my annual “roll a data protection hand grenade under something” blog post. Every year I try to be topical. And I try to apply a similar approach to spotting risks and getting them on the table for discussion as I do when conducting Privacy Impact Assessments or Compliance reviews. Only I’m less …

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The missing link in Compliance and Governance

Over the years I’ve done a lot of work in the area of Regulatory Compliance and Information Quality. Whether it is Data Protection, Information Quality, Governance or Compliance, it is important to bear in mind that what we are dealing with a Quality Management System: Data Protection Compliance is the Quality System where by the …

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Mobile phone hacking and the e-Privacy Regulations

The recent furore about the News of the World and other tabloids engaging in unauthorised access voicemails I thought it might be worth pondering the potential Irish legal situation. Now, I’m not a lawyer. This post is intended to work through some of the relevant legislation and the potential issues that might arise in Irish …

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Data Breach Code of Practice

A while back I had the privilege of being part of a group who formulated submissions to the Data Protection Commissioner regarding the Data Security Breach Code of Practice. That Code of Practice was presented to the Minister for Justice in July 2010, long before the dissolution of the Dáil in January 2011. There was …

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