This week’s decision of the First-Tier Tribunal’s decision in True Vision Productions v IC (EA/2019/0170) is probably one of the last to deal with enforcement action under the old DPA 1998, but it is one of the first that deals with the journalism exemption (section 32 of the DPA 1998, reincarnated in substantially the same form in paragraph 26 of Schedule 2 to the DPA 2018). The exemption saved the controller – the production company, TVP – from part, but not all of its difficulties. TVP did enough, however, to persuade the Tribunal to slash the ICO’s £120k monetary penalty notice to £20k. Continue reading →

The free expression right conferred by Article 10 ECHR encompasses a right “to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority”. Does this create a right to request information from a public authority, such that a refusal to disclose would constitute an interference with Article 10? Continue reading →

September: Panopticon is scraping itself off furlough and bounding back to school. Here are two information rights from August that are worth noting, both anchored in ECHR rights.

First, readers will recall the high-profile case of R (Bridges) v Chief Constable of South Wales Police and Others. Bridges concerned a challenge on (among others) Article 8 ECHR and DP grounds to the police force’s use of automated facial recognition (AFR) as part of a pilot project aimed at spotting the faces of suspects on wanted lists among the crowds. Continue reading →

In yesterday’s post outlining the Schrems II judgment, I said international data transfers were now in a fine mess. As I re-read the CJEU’s judgment, it occurs to me that my assessment was wrong. It is not a fine mess. It is an awful, almighty mess, it seems to me. Continue reading →

Well this is a fine mess. Austrian privacy campaigner Max Schrems has struck again: transfers of personal data from the EU to the US are suddenly vulnerable again, thanks to today’s CJEU judgment in Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland and Max Schrems (Case C-311/18; 16 July 2020) – the so-called Schrems II judgment. The judgment (see here: Schrems II Judgment) is complex and multi-faceted, but I’ll aim for a nutshell summary just now. Continue reading →

The Court of Appeal has today given judgment in the long-running ZXC v Bloomberg litigation ([2020] EWCA Civ 611). The key points:

1. In general, a person does have a reasonable expectation of privacy about the fact that/details of their being subject to a police investigation, up to the point of charge.
2. Reporting about alleged conduct is different from reporting about a criminal investigation into that conduct.

Continue reading →