Data & IT Law Monthly: August 2015

The overview of interesting Data & IT Law articles and news in August 2015!

The famous Google vs. Spain case begins to have an impact into national case law. In the article, you may read about the decision of United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office. The situation was that the “removal of those links from Google’s search results for the claimant’s name spurred new news posts detailing the removals, which were then indexed by Google’s search engine.” Google was ordered to remove these links too, on the ground that “links prompted by searching on an individual’s name are subject to data protection rules.

A huge Data Law issue this month is related to Ashley Madison service. There were several articles dealing with legal issues associated with the data breach (here or here).
They deal with the issues of third party vendors influence and about legal cases its users have against Ashley Madison.

Another example of the discrimination by data, also described at data & it law, was described in this article. According to authors, “you could be denied a loan simply because your friends have defaulted on theirs.” The whole issues is associated with the Facebook’s policy to allow its users to use only real names.

Legal researchers had conducted a study about the relationship between text linguistics and case law. Some of the results are very interesting:
“Increased attorney experience positively affects the amount of language the justices share with merits briefs” (they also win more cases)
positive brief sentiment positively affects the amount of language the justices’ share with briefs (though these elements are associated with losing more cases) suggesting, “that attorneys benefit from writing with a positive tone and from excluding negative and offensive language in briefs.”
“…the justices’ tend to share less language with more complexly written briefs…”

The article introduces another national case in our overview – this time the ruling by Bavarian Data Protection Agency. The case was about a very common business transaction with data – selling a bulk of data, such as emails to a third party. The Agency had ruled that “the bulk data sale was not covered by the so-called “list privilege”, which allows for a data transfer without individual consent (under certain conditions) for advertisement, marketing, or polling purposes.” Therefore, sending advertisement emails to individuals with whom the sender has no business relationship, violates data protection law.

Finally, there is a new book about legal issues associated with cloud computing. “Using a multi-disciplinary and comparative approach, this study examines emerging and innovative attempts to tackle privacy and legal issues in cloud computing such as personal data privacy, security and intellectual property protection.” Suitable for legal practitioners, as well as legal scholars.

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