News and Analysis

News emerged today that the new National Crime Agency will be completely exempt from Freedom of Information laws, creating a ‘cloak of secrecy’ around the organization. The National Crime Agency (NCA), the government’s proposed successor to the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), will target

Last evening (in India, that is) we got some very good news. Earlier, an online news item in a major newsmagazine described a forthcoming report from the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance, a cross-party body created to study Bills being presented for consideration in Parliament, as having

A widely-leaked version of the first legislative proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation is making its way through Brussels and beyond. The purpose of this 'Regulation' is to provide a new tool for harmonising the protection of personal data across the European Union, and one that takes

It is common knowledge that surveillance technologies keep us safe. These technologies can uncover where a would-be bomber has fled or reveal that a suspect is planning an attack on the New York City subways. Such successes, and the belief - and business - in them has fueled a vast expansion of CCTV

Gradually and almost imperceptibly, we have immersed ourselves in a global hypermedia environment. This environment increasingly contains everything we do: we work, we play, we organize within it. Our lives have been, in essence, turned inside out and dispersed in endless ethereal clouds - multi

Last year, Index on Censorship published an interview with Google’s chief legal officer and senior vice president David Drummond. The company was still reeling from the aftermath of the news that an attack had been launched on Gmail from China. Drummond proposed that free speech needed to be part of

This is a Guest Blog from Mathias Vermeulen is a Research Fellow at the European University Institute and the VUB's Centre for Law, Science and Technology Studies. In 1999, a young technology company called Google was brainstorming a mission statement for the corporation. A series of core principles

Facebook's new "Download your Information" feature provides only a fraction of the personal information held by Facebook.

Prime Minister David Cameron may not be quite the “pitiless blank-eyed hell wraith” Charlie Brooker portrayed in yesterday’s Guardian, but he does have some pretty frightening ideas about the Internet. This morning the Prime Minister announced, at a meeting with the Christian charity Mother’s Union

Independent security researcher Trevor Eckhart revealed yesterday that a recent software update to some HTC smartphones has accidentally given third party applications access to huge amounts of private data, including call logs, geolocation history, SMS data and a whole lot more. The update

The second 2011 meeting of the APEC Privacy Subgroup took place in San Francisco in mid September, and finalised the package of documents that comprise the Cross Border Privacy Rules (CBPR) system. Endorsed by the parent Electronic Commerce Steering Group (ECSG), these will now go forward for

On the 2nd of August 2011 the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information has called on Facebook to delete the feature on the social networking site that automatically recognizes facial features and "tags" users when others upload photos of them. According to the local German

Few understand why we focus on refugee privacy. Funders don’t understand it so don’t fund it; the public see the plight of refugees as seen on TV, not as a privacy issue; and often times the international community does everything it can to increase scrutiny of refugees. In this blog, I highlight

At the moment there is much anger about a UK Border Official who, according to the BBC, relaxed "identity checks on non-EU nationals" over the summer. This 'relaxation' then was claimed to have placed the UK at risk because names of visitors were not checked against 'watchlists'. This news is