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The European Parliament’s liberal-centrist bloc has warned over changes being made by EU countries to incoming telecoms legislation, saying they will severely…
The personal details of a number of TalkTalk customers have been stolen. In some cases, the details have been used to scam…
One of the most interesting questions in European tech privacy circles right now is about territoriality and the so-called “right to be…
Last week Facebook rolled out a new privacy policy that allows the sharing of data between its various services, such as Instagram…
The U.S. government’s healthcare insurance sign-up site HealthCare.gov is quietly handing over deeply personal information to advertising and social networks, according to…
Google has been threatened with yet another fine in Europe over its cavalier approach to EU privacy laws. However, while previous fines…
Datto is buying Backupify so it can offer a full range of data recovery services, regardless of where that data sits. Both companies…
Yesterday, when I was walking down to my local Berlin food market at lunchtime, I saw a child pointing at a strange…
The British Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee seized on Facebook’s emotion-manipulation study as a perfect example of why people need to be more aware of how their personal data is used.
The U.K. suicide prevention charity maintains that legal advisers have told it the controversial app is compliant with British data protection law — but refuse to explain this position just yet, despite strong opposition from mental illness sufferers.
Salesforce.com has taken the wraps off its first EU-sited data center in Slough, England, little more than a week after Amazon opened…
The Samaritans Radar Twitter app, launched this week by the U.K.’s main suicide prevention charity, has good intentions. However, it’s an ethical and legal minefield.
The move has big implications for latency and resilience, and of course data protection — a particular concern for German businesses.
Apart from making Xiaomi a less risky option for non-Chinese customers, the shift also improves the latency of the company’s services.
Google says it is “studying their order to determine next steps.” Based on precedent, those next steps will involve Google paying lip service to the privacy regulators and doing nothing to empower its users.
A group of European privacy regulators has sent Google suggestions for complying with EU data protection rules. As Reuters reported Friday, the…
The Global Privacy Enforcement Network has surveyed 1,200 apps to see how up-front they are with users about what they do with personal data, and the results are predictably ugly.
The consultancy giant has clients who are fretting about compliance with the incoming “right to be forgotten,” and it’s challenging startups to help build a technological fix.
Vienna’s commercial court has decided it’s not the right place to adjudicate a massive and unprecedented class action suit over Facebook(s fb)’s…
A House of Lords committee has slammed the “right to be forgotten” ruling of Europe’s top court, as well as the interpretation of the concept that’s in the new Data Protection Directive.
The logo is designed to make it clear to consumers when the goods they’re carrying contain an RFID smart chip, and to bring retailers and healthcare and banking companies out of a legal “gray zone” when it comes to data protection.
In the wake of Europe’s top court invalidating the Data Retention Directive for having insufficient privacy safeguards, the British government is set…
The app tells users what services like Facebook can figure out about their personality and intentions. In the future, it wants to encourage people to feed that data to advertisers for cash rewards. This is an attempt to improve rather than reinvent the current internet model.
EU justice chief Viviane Reding has welcomed a proposal by the Obama administration to give Europeans a right to judicial redress if their data, sent to the U.S. by authorities in their home country, has been abused.
The massive Target data breach last December was a “clarion call” for retail executives, according to Gap’s senior director of infrastructure architecture. That’s unsurprising, seeing how the breach lost Target’s CIO and CEO their jobs.
The French consumer rights group UFC-Que Chosir has sued Facebook(s fb), Google(s goog) and Twitter(s twtr) in the Paris high court over…
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has for the first time thrown her weight behind plans, initially suggested by telcos, for a “communication network inside Europe” that can keep data safe from prying U.S. eyes.
The Finnish infrastructure-as-a-service provider is moving into the U.S. with a slightly secretive new model that, it claims, will protect customers’ personal data from U.S. authorities.
When France’s privacy regulator fined Google(s goog) €150,000 ($204,000) over its unified privacy policy, it was the biggest fine the national watchdog…
The French privacy regulator CNIL has levied its biggest ever fine on the U.S. firm for breaking the law with its unified privacy policy. It’s only $200K, but the regulator threw in some extra humiliation for good measure.
U.S. web firms may have to agree to a new set of rules for handling European citizens’ data, if draft recommendations issued on Wednesday become the real deal next year.
Just days after a Berlin court decided Google(s goog)’s privacy policy and terms of use were too vague, the Dutch data protection…
What does a national cloud look like? In France’s case, it looks like two fairly similar ventures — one based on OpenStack and the other soon to follow in its footsteps. Does this approach make sense?
A coalition of lawyers, journalists and internet freedom activists launched legal action against the Dutch government, in an attempt to get it to stop using information about Dutch people gleaned from NSA surveillance.
The European Parliament’s civil liberties committee has endorsed all of Green MEP Jan Phillip Albrecht’s suggestions for tougher privacy legislation, reversing much of the lobbying work done by technology firms and the U.S. government before the NSA scandal broke.
Mail.ru Group fined for refusing to divulge private correspondence One of Russia’s top web companies, Mail.ru, said it has been fined around…
The UK-sited data center, which should help settle the compliance worries of many of Salesforce’s European customers, will be completed in 2014. The firm is also running a €5 million Innovation Challenge for EU startups.
The fine relates to Google’s accidental scraping of personal data, using the company’s Street View cars, from people’s open Wi-Fi access points back in 2010.
A group of data protection officials from across Europe has published its opinion on smartphone apps. It makes for ugly reading, as the fragmentation of the mobile ecosystem renders compliance near-impossible.
A survey by the analyst house Ovum has found a similar antipathy towards online tracking on both sides of the Atlantic. And that, they say, could have big implications for big data.
Can a single vendor dominate the public cloud services market in Europe as Amazon has managed to do in the US? It’s not very likely. The single biggest reason is obvious: Europe is not the US.
Stringent data protection rules have proven a big obstacle to cloud adoption in Europe, but now the continent’s privacy watchdogs want to make things more straightforward. How? They’re recommending external inspections on cloud providers in the U.S. and elsewhere.
UK web publishers and marketers may be grumbling about the E-Privacy Directive coming into force, but they can count themselves lucky that they’re not dealing with stricter interpretations of the law that are happening elsewhere across Europe.
Microsoft’s Bing StreetSide service was offering a welcome replacement for Google’s out-of-date Street View imagery in Germany, but now privacy complaints have seen it taken offline. When will somebody realize these complaints have gone too far?
As America and Europe try to harmonize their data protection regulations, startups in Berlin explain the benefits of a more level playing field.
With the launch of Google’s new privacy policy — which gives it the ability to share personal data across all of its services — European regulators are questioning its legality. Here’s what the web is saying about the spat.
Reports this weekend suggest that Facebook is about to face a new crackdown from European authorities over the way it collects data on users — but closer inspection suggests that it is just the latest episode in an ongoing struggle between EU officials and technology companies.
