Mr Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, told The Independent that surveillance technologies are developing at breathtaking speed. In a direct criticism of Britain, he said: “It is therefore worrying that new legislation proposals intend to expand the authorities’ power to allow personal data collection and sharing. Although safety measures are foreseen, the adoption of these measures would increase the risk of violation of individuals’ privacy.

“The retention and storing of data is delicate and must be highly protected from risk of abuse. We have already seen what a devastating and stigmatising effect losing files or publishing lists of names on the internet can have on the persons concerned. This is particularly relevant to the UK, where important private data has been lost and ended up in the public domain.”

Source: The Independent

The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone’s calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.

Source: The Guardian

Fears that sensitive genetic and health data will not be kept securely may be slowing recruitment to a medical research project designed to help further understanding of how to tackle deadly medical conditions.

Only one in 10 are signing up after receiving a letter inviting them to take part in the UK Biobank project. A report seen by the Guardian suggests that “security is likely to be a key decisive consideration for potential participants”.

The report, commissioned by the Biobank ethics and governance council, shows that members of the public fear information from their medical records, together with blood and urine samples they give, will be shared with private companies, and they are particularly opposed to the possibility that it may be passed to organisations overseas.

Source: Guardian article

Please be polite folks.

I’d be very interested to know your views - supportive or not. Internet regulation is not in my policy area but I promise you I will forward your views to Andy Burnham and Lord Carter

Source: Tom Watson MP Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office.

The culture secretary, Andy Burnham, says in an interview today that the government is considering the need for “child safe” websites – registered with cinema-style age warnings – to curb access to offensive or damaging online material.

He plans to approach US president-elect Barack Obama’s incoming administration with proposals for tight international rules on English language websites, which may include forcing internet service providers, such as BT, Tiscali, Sky and AOL, to provide packages restricting access to websites without an age rating.

Source: The Guardian.

Massive amounts of personal digital information stolen and traded online:

Their findings, which drew from stolen data harvested from these drop zones between April and October 2008, were staggering: 33 gigabytes worth of purloined data from more than 170,000 victims. Included in those troves were more than 10,700 online bank account credentials, 149,000 stolen e-mail credentials, 5,682 credit card numbers, and 5,712 sets of eBay credentials.

Source : Washington Post

Yahoo has stepped up pressure on Google and Microsoft’s online privacy policies after announcing that it would remove personally identifiable information from its database after 90 days. Yahoo currently anonymises user log data after 13 months, compared to nine months for Google search data. Microsoft keeps its users’ search data for 18 months but had pledged to lower that to six months if other search engines did the same. In another first, Yahoo’s new policy applies to logs of views and clicks of all its pages and advertising, as well as search.

Source: Financial Times

The BBC has created a version of the iPlayer that works with both Mac and Linux computers. The two systems, which have been able to stream BBC programmes via the iPlayer for a year, will now be able to handle downloads.

Source: BBC News

Sources also confirmed that Vodafone, along with BT, has signed on for a £1bn IMP pilot project. It’s planned the “black box” data harvesters that the electronic surveillance agency GCHQ wants to deploy throughout the UK communications infastructure will be inserted in Vodafone and BT’s networks initially. A Vodafone spokeswoman said: “We are not involved in any pilot programme.”
The probes would populate a pilot central database with details of who communicates with whom, when and where. The content of communications would not be fed to the database, but storing data about the communications of “people of interest” to law enforcement and the intelligence services, together with the black boxes, then would make wiretaps much easier to implement.

But now, industry sources sceptical about the wisdom and feasibility of IMP said its officials are effectively “fighting for their jobs” ahead of the consultation. When she decided to open a public consultation, Jacqui Smith ordered them to consider all options, including the possibility that no new system will be authorised.

Source: The Register

Hugo Drayton, the UK chief executive of online advertising company Phorm, is to leave at the end of the year in the firm’s second senior management restructure this month.

Source: The Guardian