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The End of the (Un)safe Harbour

The news of the Safe Harbour bashing by the European Court of Justice is hardly a news since the EU directive 95/46 already affirmed the possibility of a local jurisdiction over transnational data-exchange.

The actual issue is that the data protection authorities didn’t have the courage to state it clearly before, leaving ISPs and Telcos without actual guidance and, more important, exposed to fines and sanctions.

As a matter of fact, the EUCJ decision doesn’t invalidate the core of the safe-harbour, unless for “safe harbour” we mean a way to export overseas personal data, claiming that EU data-protection authorities lost their jurisdiction.

From a corporate perspective, an issue to be dealt with in the EU toward USA personal data exchange, is to check whether the current agreements/policies actually comply with the directive.

From a concerned citizen perspective, the question to ask is: where were the data protection authorities until this decision was issued?

Once again, the inertia of the public services led to industry damages and low citizen’s right protection.

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Why the Right To Be Forgotten Is Plain Wrong (and What Is the Best Way to Protect Your Reputation)

The Right to be forgotten – not a “right” per se, by the way – is a distorted way to enforce the right to privacy and an actual form of censorship because strips from the Court’s hands the power to decide what should be known and what shouldn’t and, further more, is a way to enforce a bottoms-up censorship that a State can easily turn into a top-down dissent shutting.

The Right to be forgotten is the wrong answer to a (maybe) real question: how do you get rid of your embarrassing past if I’ve changed course of life?

Answer: instead of trying to hide the dust under the carpet by removing the search engines’ indexes, just use it at your advantage: run a blog, a social network page or whatever elicit the interest of the search engines’ robots and tell your story. This way you can counterbalance the (allegedly) negative effect of a news relating to you because a search engine will reveal? your side of the story too.

This, of course, if you are sincere in your life-changing effort because, if you’re not,? you might find yourself exposed again to the consequences of your con stunt.

Is the solution to the Right to be forgotten actually as simple as that?

No, because to do so you should be able to properly handle an argument, collect and provide evidences and effectively deliver your statement. And since Cicero’s adepts aren’t that much, it is better to go for the censorship solution: cheaper, faster and good for the powers-that-be.

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The Dieselgate Crisis Management: Played by the Book

The way Volkswagen is handling the Dieselgate is a very good example of proper crisis management and seems coming from a crisis management handbook (such as “Master of disaster“): once discovered, the company neither denied the facts nor tried to hide it, announced an independent review, fired the culprits, called-in a new, serious manager started cooperating with the authorities, saved the money for the inevitable fines and damages.

This way Volkswagen has been able to keep the public outcry under control because no collateral damages – such as deep burying evidences, threatening or bribing involved people, further doctoring information etc. – have been suffered, thus helping the company recover its image – and customer base – faster.

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Volkswagen’s Dieselgate and The Danger of Closed Source Intellectual Property

The not uncommon practice in the ICT/Mobile business of “doctoring”products to look good on benchmarks has find its way into the automotive (and God knows into how many others) business.

Volkswagen, though, isn’t the only to blame because, true, they cheated, but no public supervising authority? ever glimpsed at the software ran by its vehicles, only focusing on “hardware” tests. And – I guess – even if the controllers would have thought of examining the software, they would have been prevented to do so by “the need of protecting Intellectual Property” that – as the “National Security Excuse” – is a buzzphrase to stop any further investigation on controversial matters.

Volkswagen’s Dieselgate shows once more that (a certain way to think of) Intellectual Property – as well of Privacy – has neatly changed its role from being a tool to protect legitimate interests into a shield for wrongdoings.

Were the Volkswagen software released under an open source licensing model, the fear of being exposed would have forced the company to play by the book and would have allowed a true and thorough check by the competent authorities, avoiding a major damage for the industry, investors, employees and citizens.