Category: Privacy and Data Protection

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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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My “Cookie Law” Legal Notice (in English and Italian)

This is how I amended the data-protection information page on my street-photography website to meet this stupid “cookie law”;

A plain wrong Italian enforcement of the EU “cookie” directive makes mandatory to obtain a prior consent to allow the use of Google Analytics, even if – as in this case – the personal identity of a user is unknown by me and Google only “might” be able to exploit the anonymous information collected through this website. So, in case you want to know if Google is able to identify you by means of this website’s access, please send me your identity together with your IP and I will forward your request to Google… or you might better do it on your own, without telling ME who you are.

And this is the Italian translation:

Un’applicazione semplicemente sbagliata della direttiva europea sui cookie impone di ottenere il consenso preventivo per usare Google Analytics anche se, come in questo caso, ignoro l’identit?? personale di chi accede al mio sito e solo Google “potrebbe” essere capace di usare le informazioni raccolte per fornirmi le statistiche. Dunque, se volete sapere se Google ? in grado di identificarvi tramite l’accesso a questo sito, per favore inviatemi le vostre generalit?? e l’IP che avete usato, e girer? la vostra richiesta a Google… oppure, meglio, potreste farlo direttamente voi, senza dire A ME chi siete.

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Italian “Cookie Law” and the Misinformation about Google Analytics

There is a lot of hype in Italy about this “cookie law” put into force since June, 2 that makes mandatory to obtain the consent of a user accessing a website to allow his “profiling” through the use of cookies.As always, a ? fleet of ? “advisers” kept, full steam, pushing companies to comply with this regulation, foreseeing dire consequences for the non-abiding companies, especially those using Google’s Analytics.

This is not entirely correct, so it is better to clarify a few points:

First of all: “cookie law” is not a “law”, but just an order issued by the Data Protection Authority under its “peculiar” view of the EU Data Protection Directive(s),

Second: the data protection directive (and its local enforcements) work only with “personal data”, i.e. data that identify or made possible to identify a natural person,

Third: a user that access anonymously a website doesn’t reveal his identity, thus the data protection act doesn’t come into play,

It comes from above that a website using Google Analytics without looking of the identity of the user is not subjected this stupid “cookie law”.

Simple as that.