Statute of Limitations & Privacy Round-Up

Brief moment of self aggrandisement - looking something up, I notice I've just missed the three year anniversary of this blog, having started in September 05. Cor. The private lawyer in me notes that the first claims for negligent misstatement or defamation should now be time barred.

Now that I am finally installed properly in Sheffield as of this week, I hope this blog will return to more rgular service than of late :-)

Advance warning - Ian Brown and I have just completed this year's Macafee Virtual Criminology Report 2008 and it should be launched week beginning Dec 8th. Clear your virtual desks in antici-pation!!!

More bathetically, in a bid to encounter friendly natives, I will be at the Sheffield Law Society Halloween bash on Oct 31st!! If you're in the area and want to meet the (in) famois Pangloss do say hi! I believe costumes are mandatory however so I will be unrecognisable, and probably dressed as a Russian botnet. Should be fun :-)

Two actual items of content: one, the very in(famous) Mr Mosley, of Nazi orgy fame, is to petition the ECHR to change privacy law and require the media to notify people before they punish stories about them. Briefly this seemed a nice idea to Pangloss, but of course all it would do is enable preliminary gagging of the press by immediate seeking of injunctions in every case. One cannot see this going anywhere as the essence of the libel/freedom of speech compromise is that post factum damages are preferable to prior restraint. I can't see any reason why this policy balance should be unsettled by reference to privacy rather than defamation. Still, interesting times.

Secondly, an oldy but a goody - yet more evidence that no one reads privacy policies. Well, if you tried to, it would take you anything from ten minutes to half an hour.

"Were people to actually read the policies and charge for that time it would cost $652bn a year.

Though that figure has limited usefulness, because people rarely read whole policies and cannot charge anyone for the time it takes to do this, the researchers concluded that readers who do conduct a cost-benefit analysis might decide not to read any policies."

As a former reader of fantasy, I love law and economics ...

Future Strategy of the ICO

As the final part of Pangloss's catch up of vital reports on privacy and DP that all seem to have emerged while I was on holiday (sigh), the ICO's own report on its future strategy on DP enforcement needs read. I refer you in the meantime to cogent comments at Naked Law.

Very broadly, the ICO propose that they "will not focus on enforcement, but on reducing the risk to UK residents of misuse of personal information about them. " This may of course however be all subject to change given the expectation that the current Commisioner Richard Thomas will retire in the not too far distant future.

Thanks also to IMPACT blog who (inter alia) drew to my attention to the large ICO survey on attitudes to privacy which preceded the issue of the strategy paper and came out March 19 08. It's all go :) One of the most remarkable and yet not unexpected findings is that after the HMRC data scandal the British public has officially lost faith in the public sector: "The ICO poll of 1,000 people found that 53% of those asked no longer had confidence in the way banks, local authorities and government departments handled personal information." See Beeb summary here.