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How does the FTC know what data is being transferred from the EU to the US?

Seal of the US Federal Trade Commission

On the 8th January last, a report caught my eye. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, one of the Federal Trade Commissioners was talking about the Schrems case and its potential economic impact. Commissioner Brill said that the “vast majority of data impacted by Safe Harbour decision is HR data, which impacts jobs on both sides of the Atlantic.” I was struck by this assertion. It seemed unlikely, to say the least, that the volume of data transferred […]

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HSE releases handwritten notes of meetings with DPC re eHealth

Handwritten notes of HSE DPC meeting

I have written before about the HSE’s claim that no notes of meetings about the eHealth Individual Health Identifier project with the Data Protection Commissioner’s office existed. As a result of an internal review, the Department has now reversed this position and issued the below sets of (partially) handwritten notes. Outcome of FOI Internal Review HSE and IHI

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HSE has no record of legal advice re Health Identifier scheme

I have previously written about why I think the CJEU’s Bara Judgment makes Section 8 of the underlying Health Identifier Act illegal. (This is the Section that allows the state to try to pool the info they hold on citizens in other databases to populate this new one.) An FOI reply has now been sent on to me about the Individual Health Identifier scheme. I am surprised to see an acknowledgement that, despite the extreme sensitivity in creating a new database […]

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What’s the prognosis for Health Identifiers after the Bara Judgment?

The Irish State loves a good database, as regular readers will know. I was doing the washing up recently, listening to the video of a recent event in TCD’s Science Gallery when I heard about the latest one. A store of electronic health records for women and infants, starting in four maternity hospitals in the new year. This is a subsection of the wider eHealth project being run by the HSE, which also includes the Individual Health Identifier database system. […]

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CJEU Judgement: Google -v- AEPD and the rise of EU privacy law

The Court of Justice of the European Union is the highest court in the EU. This year has seen a landmark set of judgments from the court around issues of Privacy and, more broadly, the assertion of the Charter of Fundamental Rights as a significant Human Rights document. The most significant of these is, of course, the Digital Rights Ireland case in which we act for the Plaintiff. But today saw another assertion of the privacy rights of the individual, with […]

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Digital Rights Ireland: ECJ Judgment striking down Data Retention

The ECJ judgement on Digital Rights Ireland’s challenge to the EU’s data retention regime.

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The National Archives and The Department of Justice’s living history

by William Murphy

The National Archives are governed by legislation. S8 of the primary National Archives Act 1986 sets out the requirement on Government departments to hand over files after 30 years. Geraldine Kennedy in The Irish Times has reported on the surprising lack of new information in the files to be released this year on the GUBU phone tapping scandal of 1983; “There are six phone-tapping files in all: four from the Department of the Taoiseach and two from the attorney general’s […]

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Flying a Balloon?

The Gardaí have had a history of their own difficulties with search warrants and the like.

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Woof, Woof

Ireland has strange Regulators, as we have learned. For example, what is the Irish Data Protection Commissioner doing about the Google “Street View” scandal? The scandal involved the deliberate collection, by Google, of wi-fi data, through its Street View vehicles. Google Street View is part of Google Maps and Google Earth. It uses adapted vehicles (mostly cars) to travel through public locations in at least thirty countries in the world. The vehicles have cameras to record a 360 degree view […]

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Data Theft

f this happened in Ireland the employee would be guilty of an offence under The Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act 1889, as extended by The Prevention of Corruption Act 1916.

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