NEWS & UPDATES

The U.S. Supreme Court is to hear a second significant case on digital privacy. Although digital data privacy is something that is fast becoming a common issue of debate, there remains a struggle to distinguish what the boundaries are when it comes to owning it or using it.

In this case, the dispute is between technology-giant Microsoft and the U.S. federal government. In 2013, U.S. prosecutors in a drug trafficking investigation obtained a warrant to search a suspect’s emails. It took the warrant to Microsoft demanding access to emails, and they put up a fight to stop access to them.
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The U.S. National Football League has reportedly seen a huge data leak where 1,113 players had their personal information posted online.

The website for the NFL Players Association also included contact information for the players and their agents in the reach. Exposed information apparently included:

• Email addresses and mobile telephone numbers
• Home addresses of agents
• IP addresses for users when signing in
• Logged information for the website was accessed
• Advisor fee percentages

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Google has been locking horns with the U.S federal government once again over the storage of data abroad.

It’s believed Google lost their third dispute in court over the matter, and lengthy legal battles remain at large.

The disputes arose when Google challenged the validity of a search warrant for looking through company data that was stored abroad. This asks the question about who has jurisdiction for information held overseas, and therefore which laws apply to the stored data.
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Cold calling gets on everyone’s nerves – no one wants to be hounded by companies trying to sell you something you don’t want.

Double glazing firm Brighter Homes Solutions has been fined £50,000 for nuisance calls to people who were registered on the Telephone Preference Service (TPS), which is a free service where you can register your details to opt out of marketing and nuisance calls.

Obviously, they shouldn’t have been cold calling them…
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The NHS has been subject to severe criticism over the past few years in relation to its data security. Not only has the issue hit the UK public healthcare system, but it seems to be a pandemic issue that includes the private sector too.

This is evident where the personal details of 250 healthcare employees were stolen in a data breach. The data breach targeted approximately 250 employees at Hywel Dda Health Board in Wales.
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Data privacy is getting more and more important, but it seems as though governmental authorities are becoming more and more lax on the matter.

Last month we possibly saw the death of U.S. citizens’ privacy rights in America. Although we’re here in the UK, this is relevant to us, because we still share so many ideals with our American counterparts, and we work with them a lot.

More often than not, the big worldwide breaches are affecting us both, and worldwide privacy rights is something we should all be concerned about.
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Although the U.K. voted to leave the EU in June’s referendum, this doesn’t seem to have altered the government’s plan to adopt strict EU data protection laws; namely the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This Regulation will come into force on the 25 May 2018 with the aim of helping organisations and companies to understand the legal framework in the EU. There are some similarities with the U.K.’s Data Protection Act (DPA), but the new GDPR seems to be more stringent.
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Thank you to the saviours that are the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)!

There has been a recent uproar when WhatsApp’s privacy terms and conditions changed to allow their parent company, Facebook, to access its users’ personal details, which included phone numbers.

The ICO has recently intervened in the Facebook-WhatsApp data sharing agreement and have managed to ‘pause’ the agreement for the time being.
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In the modern age of technology, personal data is being passed around like a hot plate. Some information can be very valuable – like the information of someone who has been the victim of a car crash, and is entitled to compensation; and entitled to have a legal representative who can recover fees.

Our firm is proud to have NEVER paid referral fees or money to claims management companies or insurers for work, even before they were banned in April 2013, and now the rules have changed and banned the payment of referral fees, a black market has developed in its place.
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