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By Simon Davies In one of the most persuasive displays ever of the market power of consumer privacy, Facebook’s recent $19BN acquisition of the popular messaging app WhatsApp appears to have been given the thumbs-down by millions of users. While it may be too early to produce a conclusive analysis, there are solid indications that …
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By Simon Davies Two weeks ago the Director of US National Intelligence, James Clapper, gave an interview with Eli Lake of The Daily Beast, in which he broke some new ground by stating that the core problem in recent spying controversies is that the NSA should have been more open about its activities. Against a …
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By Simon Davies UK Foreign Secretary William Hague is facing mounting pressure to resign following the disclosure today of sensational webcam images that show him parading theatrically in a rubber gimp suit. The leaking of these and more than 40,000 other intimate webcam images of senior public officials is likely to seriously undermine the government’s …
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By Simon Davies In less than three months Europe will undertake one of its most interesting – and potentially destabilising – elections in its recent history. Many analysts are predicting an outcome in which political extremes become more prominent and Euro-scepticism becomes a core political driver. The election comes at a critically important moment for …
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By Simon Davies Earlier this week, police in the rugged US state of New Mexico settled a $1.6M law suit brought by a drugs suspect who had been unlawfully subjected to a humiliating array of cavity searches and anal probes. The lawsuit, filed in January 2013 by David Eckert against the Deming and Hidalgo County …
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By Simon Davies Earlier this week the Secretary General of the European Commission issued a volatile administrative ruling that had the remarkable effect of simultaneously retarding both privacy and transparency. The decision by Europe’s top civil servant came after a two-month consideration of an appeal by the Privacy Surgeon against the Commission’s refusal to disclose …
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By Simon Davies Please note update at the end of this article Google yesterday broke new ground in its increasingly bitter dispute with European data protection authorities by reportedly giving false and misleading testimony to France’s highest administrative court. Google had made an application to the Conseil d’Etat, seeking to overturn a ruling by France’s …
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By Simon Davies Some people might reluctantly forgive the British Tory party over its recent history of intolerance, political self-interest and electoral deceit – in the same way that they might forgive a snake for acting like a snake. It’s in the blood. But even by Tory standards, this current conservative government has embarked on …
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By Simon Davies In some respects, 2013 was a landmark year for privacy awareness. Never before has so much attention been paid at a global level to privacy issues, and rarely has privacy moved so swiftly into the public policy mainstream. That said, we shouldn’t confuse activity with progress. The outlook for privacy reform, globally, …
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By Simon Davies The Associated Press (AP) has reported that the Obama Administration is funding at least five research groups to discover ways for its security agencies to covertly access and search huge volumes of electronic records held outside the government. News of the data mining program comes only days after President Obama signalled that …
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