Hello FOI Friends + Happy Easter! This was supposed to go out on Thursday and I messed up the scheduling, so hopefully it won't get completely lost in people's inboxes.  Despite a lower than normal number of decisions (161 is relatively low) and an obvious attempt to...

Last year, the Information Commissioner stitched up a highly paid job for the former General Counsel of Google DeepMind. The job was not advertised and it was created for that person specifically. As far as I can see, there’s no acknowledgement on the ICO website that...

In March, Deputy Information Commissioner Stephen Bonner announced that the facial recognition company Facewatch would face “no further regulatory action”. Given that all the Commissioner’s staff had done up to that point was investigate (since 2019), “no action at...

I love movies. It’s an inherited trait – my Grandma loved the cinema and took my dad to see all sorts of classics at the Ritz, a gigantic 2500-seater cinema in Wigan which some people think was once one of the biggest cinemas in the UK. It’s gone now, replaced by a...

I’ve often written about the delusion that data protection applies only to private data – there’s nothing to support that in the GDPR and some specifics to show that the opposite is true. But it’s still tricky for some to deal with the idea that data protection...

I’ve been thinking a lot about mentors this week. The celebrated film director Billy Wilder had a sign on the wall of his office. It said “What would Lubitsch have done?”. This was Ernst Lubitsch, who like Wilder had escaped the advance of the Nazis to settle in...

There are various ways to describe "King of Data Protection" Jamal Ahmed, but subtle is not one of them. His new book ‘The Easy Peasy Guide to the GDPR’ arrives with huge fanfare, promoted on a website with the address “bestgdprbook.com” (take that, Dibble) and...

The idea here was to find examples of AI in cinema that you could mention in your inevitable presentation to senior management. I went overboard and indulged my inner cinephile instead. If you read the whole thing, I hope you enjoy it. Metropolis (1921): there is an...

When I wrote my post about Facewatch, I was a bit wary. Although it’s famously difficult for a company to sue for defamation, I didn’t watch to let slip any words that went too far. In that light, I should obviously be that bit more careful when writing about a law...

If you’re looking for people to market your products to, a French company called Evaboot have got you covered. Companies offering what Evaboot does are usually squeamish about how the work, but there’s a refreshing directness about their pitch. They offer “The...