Another day, another headline about charity marketing calls. The Daily Mail proclaims ‘VICTORY’ against the scourge of charity call centres, reporting urgent (though vague) promises from the Prime Minister, and the closure of three of the rogue agency GoGen’s four...
Data Protection
An impossible thing before breakfast
The Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, made one of his occasional appearances on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning. He was there to talk about the Daily Mail's blistering investigation into the call centres used by charities to raise money over the...
A bunch of Tw*ts
The Englishman who wades into Scottish politics on either side, especially if he lives in England, is probably taking a huge risk of being disagreed with vehemently, no matter what he says. Nevertheless, the explosion of interest into the so-called 'Clypegate' list...
Roast Lamb
Politicians rarely handle data protection with anything like aplomb. The political parties' record on compliance with DP and PECR is awful, and they often seem to think privacy laws don't apply to them. An impressive example of this emerged today, with a largely...
A very bad call
A few weeks ago, I heard someone on the radio talking about why American bankers are prosecuted and imprisoned (sometimes), whereas British bankers almost invariably are not. The commentator said that American banking regulation is rules-based, whereas British banking...
Hunting the snark
There isn't any legal requirement to publish a clear public link, explaining how to make an FOI request, but it is obviously in the interests of both applicants and the organisation. The applicant knows where to go, and the organisation directs requests into the hands...
Careless
The people who run NHS England and the Health and Social Care Information Centre never wanted to give the public a choice about whether their data would be mined and sold for research purposes (and the clumsy, ill-infomed opt-out that was dragged out of them isn't a...
Stop the press
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Leveson proposals for press regulation, the Independent Press Standards Organisation is currently the preferred regulator for most newspapers. Even if you think that IPSO shouldn't be the regulator for press standards and...
Underwhelming
The Information Commissioner has published the latest in a long line of undertakings, this time involving Northumbria NHS Trust. As always, the ICO’s press release is very misleading about what has really happened. This time, the notice has been ‘issued’, a word...
Liberal Spamocrats
The Varsity newspaper reports a scandal in academia, as Julian Huppert stands accused of spamming Cambridge's students with crass emails about revenge porn. As well as reflecting the understandable annoyance of students at the spam and its triggering content, Varsity...