I was sent the following press release about a new project, named PRESCIENT for Privacy and Emerging Sciences and Technologies: Emerging technologies offer significant benefits but also risks to our privacy. How to deal with these risks is the subject of a new three-year project funded by the European Commission. Called PRESCIENT, the project will…
Category: Non-U.S.
A big night out: drinking, dancing, fingerprinting
Saffron Howden reports: Somewhere in Perth’s central business district is a building containing the names, ages, addresses, photographs and unique fingerprint codes of thousands of revellers who danced and drank at Sydney’s Home nightclub last year. Home, in Darling Harbour, began trialling a biometric ID scanning entry system nine months ago. Patrons lined up before…
Critics challenge B.C. privacy law proposals
The B.C. government is getting stiff opposition to proposed changes to privacy laws that would make it easier for public bodies such as the RCMP to gather and share personal information about residents of the province. A senior civil servant related told a legislative committee hearing this week that in some cases, lives could be…
Israel Supreme Court: Talkbackers needn’t be exposed in libel cases
Nurit Roth reports: Surfers who post comments on Web sites scored a victory in Israel’s Supreme Court last week. The vice president of the country’s highest court, Eliezer Rivlin, and Justice Edmond Levy handed down a majority ruling that Internet service providers cannot be forced to disclose the identity of anonymous posters, even at the…