I understand that Travel Counsellors is appealing the finding in HHJ Hacon’s judgment in Trailfinders v Travel Counsellors & Ors [2020] EWHC 591 (IPEC) that it was liable for breach of confidence because it received customer information from the Trailfinders’ employees it recruited which it ought to have known was fairly and reasonably to be regarded as confidential to Trailfinders.
ICO fine for British Airways lands at £20m
Ever since the Information Commissioner issued British Airways with a notice proposing to impose a massive fine of £183.39m for a data breach incident in 2018, we have all be waiting with bated breath to see how that process would conclude. A fine at that level would have been the largest ever issued by a data protection regulator in Europe, and would have dwarfed the eye-watering €50m proposed by the French data protection authority CNIL in respect of Google’s advertisement personalisation practices, affecting millions of French citizens. The prospect of BA, a corporate victim of a criminal cyber-attack affecting around 400,000 people’s (mostly payment-card) data, being subject to fine in excess of 4x as large certainly grabbed the headlines. Continue reading
Moss: Article 10 ECHR is irrelevant to FOIA
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
Key points from the Bridges facial recognition appeal
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
My Data Went to the Caribbean. Jamaica? No, It Went of its Own Accord
You have to admire the ingenuity of lawyers. Who would have thought that the GDPR could be a tool to try and force the Home Office to allow a deported overstayer with a lengthy criminal record back into the UK to conduct an in-person appeal? Not the Court of Appeal for a start in Johnson v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2020] EWCA Civ 1032. Continue reading
Newman v Southampton CC: child, mother, journalist – whose rights win out?
The High Court handed down judgment on Friday in Newman v Southampton City Council & Ors [2020] EWHC 2103 (Fam), the first recorded judgment concerning journalistic access to the court file in public law family proceedings. The case is likely to be of interest to media lawyers generally, and throws up potential complications surrounding the scope and extent of the privacy rights of children vis-à-vis their parents. Continue reading