February 24, 2010

First decision in the Italian criminal case against Google executives

This article is also available in: Deutsch: [Erstes Urteil im italienischen Strafverfahren gegen Google-Führungskräfte | http://www.unwatched.org/node/1721] Today, 24 February 2010, the Court of Milan made public the decision in the criminal trial against four Google executives, charged of defamation and illegal personal data handling in relationship to the publication on the video sharing platform of […]

Read more

September 13, 2006

TOR servers seized in Germany

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) The public prosecutor’s office of Konstanz, Germany raided, during the last weekend some computing centres and seized several servers that were running copies of TOR, a well known software used for the anonymisation of the Internet usage. The action was related to a child pornography case, and, […]

Read more

September 10, 2008

Spanish local police keeps illegal database for political reasons

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) It has been revealed that the Spanish local police of Sada (Galicia) was keeping an illegal database with information and pictures of people, gathered during night patrols. On 14 August 2008, a counsellor, a local police officer and a Guardia Civil sergeant discovered in an office of […]

Read more

September 12, 2007

EU asks the customers' opinion on the DoubleClick -Google affair

As Google plans to buy out U.S. web advertising supplier DoubleClick, the European Commission has already sent questionnaires to Google customers on the matter, even before Google has actually filed to the European Union’s top antitrust regulator for the purchase. This is considered a rather unusual step as although the European Commission has frequently sent […]

Read more

September 26, 2007

European Commission investigates Apple's European prices

The representatives of the European Commission (EC) had a closed meeting last week with Apple and other four major record companies, regarding the different pricing schemes used in different countries in Europe. The meeting should have lasted for two days, but two record companies EMI Group and Warner Music Group decided they didn’t need to […]

Read more

October 10, 2007

UK: Decrypt data or go to prison!

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) The controversial Part 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) in UK is in force starting with 1 October 2007. This new regulation gives the power to police forces to ask for the disclosure of encryption keys, or force suspects to decrypt encrypted data. RIPA […]

Read more

November 5, 2008

One more step for France in adopting the graduated response

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) Despite all opposition and debates, on 30 October 2008, a crushing majority of the French Senate voted in favour of the anti-piracy law, the so called Hadopi law, introducing the graduate response against illegal content downloading. The law enabling the introduction of three-strikes measure against file-sharers and […]

Read more

November 7, 2007

Whois privacy problems not solved by ICANN

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar) ICANN meeting that took place last week (29 October – 2 November 2007) in Los Angeles was expected to decide on the WHOIS database privacy problems. But unfortunately the decision taken was just to make further studies on the matter, despite the already seven years of discussions […]

Read more

November 6, 2013 · Blogs

EU Council worries that data protection reform is too fast

The recent EU Council allegedly decided to slow down the speed of the reform of data protection arguing that it was moving too fast. Germany, for example, was reportedly worried about "not moving too quickly". By a strange coincidence, this is exactly the same argument used by the main lobbying groups. However, if the data […]

Read more

December 17, 2014 · Blogs

Irish surveillance legislation: secret interpretations of secret laws

A few weeks after introducing lawless internet blocking in Ireland, Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald took her assault on the rule of law to another level. On 26 November 2014, she introduced into national law – by means of a “Statutory Instrument” (SI, an executive power that does not require any parliamentary discussion) – new […]

Read more

 

January 25, 2017 · Blogs

#PrivacyCamp17: Controlling data, controlling machines

Accountability, transparency and profiling were the buzzwords of the fifth annual Privacy Camp, which took place on 24 January in Brussels. The camp, this year entitled “Controlling data, controlling machines: dangers and solutions”, brought together civil society, policy-makers and academia to discuss the problems for human rights in the digital environment. The event is organised […]

Read more

 

May 4, 2011

Copyright complaint leads to public domain music library takedown

This article is also available in: Deutsch: [Urheberrechtsbeschwerde: Musikbibliothek offline | http://www.unwatched.org/EDRigram_9.9_Urheberrechtsbeschwerde_Musikbibliothek_offline] International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), the largest public domain music library on the Internet, has been recently taken offline following a complaint from the UK’s Music Publishers Association which convinced registrar GoDaddy to takedown their website. The action was brought over a […]

Read more