On May 13, 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a landmark decision that allows EU citizens the “right to be forgotten” – basically, the right to withdraw consent over the processing of an individual’s personal information. Under that ruling, individuals have the right to ask Google and other search engines […]
Jonathan Zittrain[1] calls the right to be forgotten a “ bad solution to a very real problem.” This article sets out to answer two questions. Firstly, what is the problem that the right to be forgotten is trying to solve? Secondly, why is the right to be forgotten a bad solution to this problem?
The re-posting of this analysis is part of a cross-posting collaboration with MediaLaws: Law and Policy of the Media in a Comparative Perspective. “Dear User, your Facebook account has been temporary deactivated”. This statement represents one of the typical Facebook (FB) notifications to users in the event of flagged content or general malfunctions. There could be […]
A quarter century since he helped to create it, the man widely regarded as the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has renewed calls for a Digital Bill of Rights to help preserve the open and innovative character of his invention and to protect human rights in the so-called digital age.
The course Comparative Law: Privacy and Data Protection is offered this coming term at Osgoode Law School. IP Osgoode interviewed the course co-professors, James Williams (Osgoode site, personal site) and Michael Power (Osgoode site, personal site) for their insight on the exciting contemporary debates in the field.
Dubious and likely illegal image scraping is alive and well. And outside of particularly public, harmful cases like Rehtaeh Parsons’ photo ending up on a dating site, few organizations or governments seem to be effectively coordinating to stop the practice.
There is a little-known place in the world where you can approach absolutely anyone—a Brazilian federal minister or WIPO legal officer; a policy manager at Google or the world's leading cybersecurity expert; an Indonesian LGBT activist or Pakistani digital rights advocate; or someone at some intersection of civil society, government, business, academia, law, technology, or […]
Just because technology now exists to track a person through their mobile phone does not mean you are legally entitled to do so. This was the main conclusion by the Supreme Court of New Jersey in their unanimous, groundbreaking geolocational privacy decision in State v. Earls.
On July 15th, 2013, Judge Walton of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (“FISC”) granted a motion put forward by Yahoo on June 14th, which called for the release of more details about the government’s push in a 2008 case to obtain user data under the Protect America Act.
An Austrian student studying law in Silicon Valley has raised serious flags about Facebook’s lack of adherence to privacy law and disclosure regulation.