Scholarly Articles & Institutional Publications

Cookies are making headlines in Europe recently. In this blog we will have a closer look at the situation of France, Germany, Italy and the UK, focusing on information to users, users’ consent and consequences of violations. What is a cookie? “A cookie is a small piece of data that a website saves on your […]

The news has been saturated lately by stories of data breaches. The IRS discovered recently that a breach of citizens’ tax return information covered more than 330,000 taxpayers, three times that originally identified in May of this year. Target’s data breach in 2013 is back in the news because the company just settled claims against it by […]

[continues…] The Target breach illustrates the breadth of applicable state laws when a data breach affects a large company. On December 19, 2013, Target announced that it had been the victim of a criminal attack on its computer network by third-party intruders who stole payment card data and other personal information from Target shoppers who shopped […]

Information Law Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 2, Autumn 2015 From the article Privacy is being challenged by the burgeoning use of Big Data. The term “Big Data” has multiple definitions. This paper discusses the challenges to privacy posed by Big Data viewed as an Information Technology process that collects and parses huge sets of data […]

Information Law Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 2, Autumn 2015 From the article The emergence of mega-suite vendors, more use of the cloud, increases in data breach frequency and cost and big data privacy impacts make healthcare IT (HIT) vendor arrangements more complex, and solid agreements with HIT vendors, more important than ever. Addressing key legal […]

On June 16, 2015, the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) adopted an opinion on the utilization of drones for all civil purposes. According to WP29, several privacy risks may arise in relation to the processing of data carried out by the equipment on-board a drone. “Such risks can range from a lack of transparency of […]

On June 18, 2015, the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) released a press statement to share the results of a survey launched to evaluate the EU practice regarding de-listing requests. A little more than one year ago the European Court of Justice (“ECJ) issued its famous”right-to-be-forgotten”decision in the Costeja case, C-131/12, holding that data subjects have […]

On June 19, 2015, the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) released a press statement to share its views on the text of the Data Protection Regulation Proposal. WP29 stressed that the new legislation should: not lower the current level of protection provided in the Directive 95/46; be clear, simple and easy to understand; and allow […]

On May 28, 2015, ABI Research and the International Telecommunication Union issued a Global Cybersecurity Index (GCI) report according to which the U.S. has the strongest cybersecurity in the world. The CGI aims at providing a worldwide snapshot of where countries stand on cybersecurity. It drafts a country-level index and a global ranking on cybersecurity […]

On March 19, 2015, the Italian Data Protection Authority issued Doc 3881513 providing guidelines for web operators performing online profiling. The document applies to web operators established in Italy. The guidelines clarify the principles applicable to profiling activities aiming at singling out users. These profiling activities generally aim at offering targeted services, or advertisement, as […]