R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police and Others [2019] EWHC 2341 (Admin) To read the judgment click here. The High Court turned down an application for judicial review of the decision by South Wales Police to use automated facial recognition technology in a pilot project. The project involved the capture of digital […]
Lloyd v Google LLC [2019] EWCA Civ 1599 To read the judgment click here. The Court of Appeal has overturned the High Court’s decision, which had refused permission for Mr Richard Lloyd to serve proceedings on Google for the alleged secret collection of browser-generated information from Apple iPhone users. Mr Lloyd had brought the claim […]
ECJ case C-673/17 (Planet 49) To read the judgment click here. In this case the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) was asked to consider a series of questions in relation to the use of pre-ticked checkboxes and cookies. It held the following: A pre-ticked checkbox, which a user must de-select to refuse […]
Lachaux v Independent Print Ltd and another [2019] UKSC 27 To read the judgment click here. The Supreme Court has clarified the approach to the serious harm test in section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013 (“the Act”). Section 1: (1) A statement is not defamatory unless its publication has caused or is likely to […]
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) published its 2018/2019 Annual Report on 8 July 2019. Here is a short summary: The number of enquiries the ICO received increased by 66% to just under half a million. The number of data protection complaints almost doubled compared with the previous year. Subject Access Requests made up the largest […]
By Tom Orrell & Melissa Stock Privacy law has never been a straightforward affair in England. Its development has been piecemeal over the past two centuries.[1] In fact the laws that govern information today are spread across multiple frameworks, including: libel (protecting reputation), data protection (rights over the processing of personal data), breach of confidence […]
This is an overview of DB v The General Medical Council (‘GMC’) [2018] EWCA Civ 1497 in the Court of Appeal. It is now the leading judgment in the approach to be taken on disclosure in so-called mixed personal data cases – that is subject access requests where the information requested by the data subject […]
This is an overview of the e-Privacy Regulation (‘ePR’), which will replace Directive 2002/58/EC (Regulation on Privacy and Electronic Communications), or ‘e-Privacy Directive’. The e-Privacy Directive protects the confidentiality of electronic communications and applies to publicly available electronic communications services. In the U.K., the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulation (“PECR”) implements the e-Privacy Directive. In […]
Employee Computer Files The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that an employer may ‘freely consult’ an employee’s computer file that is not private, so long as the company’s IT charter makes a provision to do so. In Libert v France (Application No 588/13), an employee of SNCF (France’s national railway company) was […]
Last week an important case was decided in the High Court on the so-called ‘Right to be Forgotten’. The Claimants, NT1 and NT2, are businessmen who asked Google to remove links to search results that revealed their past convictions. The High Court judgment is lengthy and comprehensive. For those who wish to analyse the case […]
