Recent Articles

Again: loss of personal data by public officials in the UK

Andreas Busch
January 24, 2008 22:17

Less than two months after the loss of the personal details of 25 million people by the UK's tax authorities (see this blog entry), another substantial loss of personal data has occurred in Britain. As the BBC website writes, a laptop containing personal details of 600.000 people has been stolen...

Jeremy Clarkson and identity theft

Andreas Busch
January 07, 2008 14:06

Well, first of all, a happy new year to my readers! And I am glad to be able to report that page visits to this blog more than doubled in 2007 over 2006, to well over 5000 pageviews. I am very happy about this and will take it as a reminder to update this blog more often than I have recently done...

British tax authorities lose personal details of 25 million people

Andreas Busch
November 20, 2007 21:54

A crass case of neglect and breach of data protection legislation has led to the loss of discs containing the names, addresses, dates of birth, bank account details and National Insurance numbers of 25 million people in the United Kingdom, it was revealed today (see reports by the BBC, the...

Google offers olive branch to privacy activists

Andreas Busch
September 17, 2007 17:43

Google, the data behemoth and "internet superpower" (The Economist) has recently suffered from extensive sympathy withdrawal. Founded by two Stanford graduate students and rising meteorically to utter domination of the internet search market (recent market share: 48 per cent), the company...

Senior UK judge wants everyone on DNA database for fairness reasons

Andreas Busch
September 05, 2007 17:42

One of the United Kingdom's most senior judges, Lord Justice Sedley, today demanded that every UK resident and every visitor to the country should have their DNA recorded on the national DNA database (see, respectively, the BBC news website, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, and the Daily Telegraph on...

Back at the blog — and a job vacancy to fill!

Andreas Busch
July 04, 2007 16:01

This is the first entry to the blog in two months, and first of all I have to apologize for not writing earlier. Lots of interesting things have been happening in the area of privacy, from EU decisions about cooperation and data sharing in law enforcement to Germany debating online-searches of...

Germany to introduce unique personal identifier — for tax purposes

Andreas Busch
May 04, 2007 21:22

It has been a long time in the making — since 2003, to be precise, when the Tax Bill passed in December of that year created the provisions, but it is only now that the implementation takes place: on 1 July 2007, the German Federal Tax Office (Bundeszentralamt für Steuern) will start...

House of Commons and House of Lords launch inquiries into the "surveillance society"

Andreas Busch
May 02, 2007 21:36

The subject of privacy and surveillance has been moving up the United Kingdom's political agenda since last autumn, as I have argued in this blog on various occasions (see here, here, here and here). Now, it seems, the debate has reached the Houses of Parliament, after various reports and many...

UK health agency erroneously publishes doctors' personal details online

Andreas Busch
April 27, 2007 09:58

The body responsible for recruitment into Britain's National Health Service, the NHS Medical Training Application Service or MTAS, has mistakenly published the confidential personal details of junior doctors on its website.The breach of security was revealed by Channel 4, who report on their...

Massive theft of credit card data at TJX in US and UK

Andreas Busch
March 30, 2007 09:54

As the Boston Globe reports in its online edition today, retail firm TJX Companies, Inc. has been the subject of a hacker attack that has resulted in the biggest theft of credit and debit card numbers ever.TJX operates around 2500 stores and owns T.J. Maxx, Marshall's and A.J. Wright in the United...