The music industry would be in better shape now if it had engaged with Napster rather than fought it.

So says Geoff Taylor, head of music industry body BPI, in a column written for the BBC.

In the column, Mr Taylor expressed “regret” that the music industry did not move faster to work out how to use the net to promote and sell records.

Source: BBC News

GREATER Manchester Police is one of five forces who have launched a legal challenge to keep old criminal records of minor offences on the national computer database, the Court of Appeal was told.

They are challenging a ruling by the Information Commissioner, upheld by the Information Tribunal, that the holding of such records did not comply with the Data Protection Act.

Source: Manchester Evening News

Four laptops were stolen from Bord Gáis offices on Foley St in Dublin’s north inner city in the early hours of June 5th.

One of the computers, containing the banking details of around 75,000 people, was not encrypted.

Source: IrishTimes.com

The Home Office’s revised proposals to monitor all text messages, email and ­internet use will have poor safeguards, prove very costly and not even work, London School of Economics researchers have found.

Their study says the department’s plans to boost the capability of law enforcement and intelligence agencies to analyse the internet activities of all British citizens will work only if new laws are passed.

Source: guardian.co.uk

Street View has raised privacy concerns wherever it has launched but the UK’s privacy regulator the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has said that Google’s privacy protections are good enough to protect people’s privacy.

A committee of all 27 EU member states’ privacy regulators, the Article 29 Working Party, has asked Google to ensure, though, that original images are destroyed once they have been used to create blurred images that the public can see.

When introducing Street View to Europe, Google undertook to automatically blur faces and vehicle number plates to protect the privacy of people photographed on the street.

Source: OUT-LAW

All internet and phone traffic should be recorded to help the fight against terrorism, according to one of the UK’s former spy chiefs.

Source: BBC News
Hat tip: @privacyint

David Smith, the deputy Information Commissioner, is demanding tighter controls amid concerns the police are pressuring businesses to install closed circuit television because it helps gather intelligence.

Source: telegraph.co.uk
via: The Register

The EU passed the Data Retention Directive years ago, a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems). But Sweden never passed it into national law, and the European Commission has now sued the country to make sure a bill appears.

Source: ars technica

Every five years the EU adopts a five-year plan for justice and home affairs affecting many areas of EU citizens’ civil liberties – policing, immigration and asylum, criminal law, databases and data protection. The Tampere programme (2000-2004) was followed by the Hague programme[pdf] (2005-2009), which included the commitment to bring in biometric passports and ID cards, and a new programme will be adopted in Stockholm in December.

Source: guardian.co.uk

The meeting began with introductions and quickly moved on. We had a number of specific points we wanted to discuss with the Commission and they had some equally specific points they wanted to discuss with us; as it turns out both were pretty much the same.

We discussed the issue of informed consent vs implied consent. I raised my concerns that Phorm, BT and the Home Office are all stating that consent can be implied with regards to data published on the world wide web. The Commission responded very strongly on this stating that EU Law does not recognise implied consent and that consent must be explicit and informed and that all such services must be Opt-In….

Source:NoDPI