Richard Willingham reports: Biometric identification, such as fingerprint scans, will not be used in the mandatory pre-commitment scheme for poker machines, quashing fears that punters’ privacy would be breached. Families Minister Jenny Macklin and independent MP Andrew Wilkie yesterday ruled out using biometric data, favouring a smartcard to limit the amount gamblers could spend on…
Category: Non-U.S.
Google asks Swiss court to lift Street View curbs
Associated Press reports that Google continues to encounter resistance to Street View in the Swiss courts from the country’s data protection commissioner, Hanspeter Thuer. Thuer disputed the tech giant’s claim that its technology automatically blurs faces and car license plates: Using a live version of Street View, he demonstrated examples where the software failed to…
Alberta Proposing Mandatory Police Surveillance Laws
From CIPPIC (the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic): The Alberta Provincial legislature is proposing legislation that will obligate telecommunications service providers to provide police with a vast amount of “telephone and other electronic communications records”, including: locational (GPS) data, cellular phone records, all inbound and outbound text messages, and internet browsing history. If…
Germany’s data protection officials target web advertising
Data protection authorities in Lower Saxony are stepping up their efforts to make it harder for German websites to pass along visitors’ IP addresses. If they succeed, it could mean the end of online advertising in Germany in its current form. The state’s data protection commissioner, Joachim Wahlbrink, has said that web sites should not…