David Meyer

Facebook and Google introduced new privacy settings in order to comply with Europe’s sweeping new privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, but campaigners still aren’t satisfied. Some official complaints on the day the new law went into force, and now others have raised further concerns about how the companies manipulate people into exposing their data.

Facebook has failed in a last-ditch attempt to delay a major privacy case’s journey to Europe’s top court. The case in question was brought about by Facebook’s arch-nemesis, the Austrian law student Max Schrems, who has already succeeded in sinking the Safe Harbor agreement that gave U.S. firms a simple way to import the data of people from the European Union. As before, he is concerned that US intelligence programs break Europeans’ privacy rights.

The US State Department has warned against countries such as Russia forcing web service providers to store citizens’ data locally, even though such moves are at least in part inspired by Edward Snowden’s revelations of the National Security Agency spying on foreigners’ personal data.

“[People should not] use the Snowden revelations as an excuse for taking what are essentially protectionist measures that will harm the ability of the Internet to work in an organic way,” a State Department official said, ahead of the annual Internet Governance Forum meeting in Istanbul.

A ban on office communications in the evening and during vacation time could become law in Germany. German labor minister Andrea Nahles said that the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health was consulting on how such a law could be made -- what thresholds would need to be mandated, and so on.

She said the first results were expected in 2015.

The United States spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and that’s a pretty big deal because she’s a head of state, but this wasn’t purely a one-sided affair.

According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, German intelligence also listened in on a call involving erstwhile US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Australian government has announced plans to introduce mandatory data retention, forcing telecommunications companies to hang on to certain customer data for up to 2 years.

The plans were leaked ahead of a press conference, in which Prime Minister Tony Abbott said they would help in the fight against terrorism. The Liberal-led coalition government said it would “update Australia’s telecommunication interception law which predates the Internet era and is increasingly ineffective,” as well as introduce “proper oversight” to protect Australians’ privacy rights.

[Commentary] Censorship is always bad, right? Not to many people around our connected globe, and there is sometimes validity to their views. Unfortunately the tension between those views places a profound and perhaps dangerous dilemma at the heart of the Internet.

Google could face criminal proceedings, as well as a €1 million ($1.35 million) fine, in Italy if it doesn’t change its data-handling ways.

According to a ruling by the Italian data protection commissioner, who has been coordinating with counterparts across Europe, Google must do the following within 18 months to comply with privacy law:

• Make it clear to users that their data is mixed and matched across Google services for marketing purposes, both by cookies and by more advanced behavioral “fingerprinting” technologies.
• Get explicit opt-in permission from users before using their data in this way.
• Define how long it retains users’ data.
• Delete users’ data when asked, within 2 months for data stored on “active” systems and within 6 months for backed-up data.

[Commentary] Google and other search engines operating in Europe have to take down links to information about people if those people ask them to do so, provided there’s no public-interest or other good reason for keeping the links up.

The problem for now, however, is that the search engines are already plowing ahead with the takedowns and no-one is sure how exactly they’re doing so. European data protection officials, who are due to meet with Microsoft and hopefully Google, want the search engines’ test for removing data to be more transparent. This could be accomplished with a series of blog posts.

We don’t need to know the details of every case (information overload won’t help anyone, and it would defeat the purpose of the exercise anyway) but there’s no reason we can’t get further insight into what the takedown teams are thinking and how they are operating.

Mass surveillance by intelligence agencies is almost certainly illegal under international law, even where it involves collecting but not looking at people’s data, the United Nations human rights chief has advised.

In a damning but cautiously phrased report, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay recommended that governments review their national laws, policies and practices to check that they do comply with international human rights law, then fix them if they don’t.

The report doesn’t name names, but it’s not very hard to see that much of it applies to the activities of the US and its various intelligence partners. “The very existence of a mass surveillance programme creates an interference with privacy,” Pillay said.