RPGWW

Presently, the British Parliament is in the process of passing legislation to force ISPs to inspect all data packets passing through their systems for signs of illegal activities. Meanwhile, many of the major ISPs themselves are currently working out a deal to sell anonymized browsing records to a former spyware company so as to inject targeted advertising into a user's internet browsing. This despite the fact that in recent years, there have been at least two scandals involving the ease by which so-called anonymous datasets can be associated to specific individuals.

Both of these events merely seem to be yet another example of how privacy concerns in the UK are being pushed aside. Even with the troubles in this vein in the US going on, it's still frightening to see these sorts of things going on anywhere in the world, especially to this degree.

I'm not sure how relevant and meaningful a comment I can offer at this point, but I was oddly reminded of my brief time on the GOPUSA forum. Europe, to them, was the land of godless liberal scum obsessed with their own sense of entitlement to rights that didn't matter.

And yet here's Europe, selling out individuals to corporations in the best conservative capitalist style.

art-for-a-change.com has some neat stuff.

I completely missed those posters when they appeared over here. I don't like that I did. Nor do I like anything Idran mentioned, really. :[

Do we even have a right to privacy over here? I'm not sure that England has the same concrete rights that Americans draw from their bill of rights. The closest document we've ever had is the Magna Carta, and all that determined was that the King couldn't make up laws.

You do, yes. Specifically, the Human Rights Act, passed in 1998, which prohibits the British government from acting in a manner contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, under which Article 8 grants an implicit right of privacy. Unfortunately, under the British system, there is no real authority above Parliament that can strike down a law or ruling deemed incompatible with a prior ruling due to the concept of parliamentary sovereignty. All your judicial system can do in this case is issue a declaration of incompatibility, which Parliament must then explicitly act on, though they do have an accelerated process by which such a bill can be repealed. Beyond that, an effected individual's only recourse is to appeal to the European Court on Human Rights in the matter.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, the Data Protection Act should prevent things isuch as that data-selling process I mentioned before, but they're getting through the letter of that law through the anonymizing of the dataset, even though as mentioned, that's easily circumvented by a determined individual.

Bumping for a new news story: the British government is now trying to push through legislation to force all British ISPs and telecom companies to give details on all emails sent and phone calls made in the country, as well as time spent online. This information will be placed in a massive database and held for up to 12 months for purposes of national security.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b ... 965033.ece

This is quite simply ridiculous, and I am increasingly astounded by every new means of violation of privacy that the UK tries to pass through the system.

For the record, from my European studies, and this is no offense to the UK, but it probably has one of the worst track records as regards human rights and avoiding them.


I know there's no such thing in Malta.