Featured Articles

Identifying Individuals in Internet Iniquity: ECHR rules on naming wrongdoers

December 02, 2008 13:54

The European Court of Human Rights gave an important decision today in KU v. Finland, dealing with the issue of whether states are obliged to have laws which allow for the identification of internet wrongdoers. In short, according to the court the answer is yes - national laws must "provide the...

Recent Articles

Coleman v. MGN - jurisdiction in internet defamation cases

March 16, 2012 14:22

The Supreme Court yesterday gave a decision on internet defamation in Coleman v. Mirror Group Newspapers, where it held that the Irish courts had no jurisdiction in relation to a photograph said to have been published on the Mirror website in 2003. The judgment turns for the most part on...

User consent to privacy policies is a fiction - here's why

March 13, 2012 17:34

One simple answer to our privacy problems would be if everyone became maximally informed about how much data was being kept and sold about them. Logically, to do so, you'd have to read all the privacy policies on the websites you visit. A few years ago, two researchers, both then at Carnegie...

Witness comments on Facebook cause assault case to be dismissed

March 07, 2012 13:07

This may be the first time in Ireland that a case has been dismissed on the basis of Facebook comments. From the Mayo News:A WOMAN who wrote comments on a Facebook page about an alleged assault was told her actions had ‘fatally compromised’ the assault case which was subsequently dismissed.Judge...

Illegal blood sample database to be destroyed

March 03, 2012 11:57

Two years ago the Sunday Times broke the story that the Irish national children's hospital was illegally keeping blood samples from almost every Irish newborn since 1984, in what amounted to a de facto national DNA database. Two years later, the decision has finally been made to destroy these...

More Ryanair litigation against flight resellers - this time with a data protection twist

February 29, 2012 11:26

You might have noticed that Ryanair is busy with litigation against services which screenscrape flight details from its site or act as resellers of its flights. (Previously on this blog 1|2|3|4|5.)Usually those cases have centered on arguments that this activity amounts to a breach of either...

Self-service search warrants after Damache v. DPP

February 24, 2012 15:12

A peculiar feature of Irish law for many outside observers is the fact that search warrants are treated as being an executive rather than judicial function (PDF, ch.4). As a result a number of statutes give police the power to themselves issue such warrants on a "self-service" basis. Yesterday's...

Is illegally obtained CCTV footage admissible in evidence?

February 23, 2012 23:57

Every now and then media reports reveal an employer who has engaged in illegal CCTV monitoring of staff and today's example is Dunnes Stores which was shown in an unfair dismissal claim to have secretly used CCTV to view employees in a restaurant in Galway:DUNNES STORES monitored workers on CCTV at...

Checking the PULSE

February 23, 2012 20:46

We've known for some time now that there's been significant abuse of the Garda PULSE database - whether this takes the form of gardaí checking up on daughters' boyfriends or more seriously information being sold to armed robbers. This abuse was one of the factors which led the Data Protection...

Heads should roll. But, of course, they won't.

February 20, 2012 09:16

Justified outrage from Eamon Delaney in the Sunday Independent:It is shocking but not surprising that not a single civil servant has been fired for an incredible bout of behaviour at the so-called Department of Social Protection.It seems that almost 100 departmental employees accessed the personal...