Swiss legal system: online introductions

The following online resources offer a good introduction into the Swiss legal system:

• ‘Introduction to the Swiss Legal System: A Guide for Foreign Researchers’ by Fridolin M.R. Walther (published 15 November 2000)
• ‘The Swiss Legal System and Research’ by Gregory M. Bovey (published November 2006)

How little I know

No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

via der englisch blog (german)

German consumer protection organisation takes action against Facebook

Yesterday the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZBV) sent cease-and-desist letters to Facebook, MySpace und Xing.

The VZBV maintains that the terms of services, privacy policies and copyright terms are to the disadvantage of the users and grant the operators extensive rights. It further criticises that personal data is often processed without consent and beyond the specified purposes. It urges the social networking sites to change their terms accordingly.

In case the companies will not react to the cease-and-desist letters the VZBZ threatens to pursue legal action.

More:
News 24 online article (English)
Spiegel Online article (German)
VZBZ’s press release (German)

(Added 5.41 pm) The German IT news service Heise reports (German) that Xing announced its support for the suggestions of VZBZ. It will change its terms and apply certain measures such as the deletion of forum postings of former users immediately. According to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (German) Facebook considers the criticism unjustified but will examine the letter.

No need for data protection legislation

“Does the notion of trying to control computer data by legislation make sense at all? A growing body of opinion both inside and outside the computer industry thinks not. There is a shortage of hard evidence that computers are causing an invasion of privacy. … It usually turns out that the computer is not the real culprit, and that such wrongs as there are can be dealt with under existing laws.”

The Times, 26 March 1980 as cited in CJ Bennett Regulating Privacy.

12kg personal data of yours out there

There are about 12kg or 3000 sheets of paper of personal information per UK citizen out there – if we assume, that  Mirror journalist Matt Roper is an average citizen. For his article Spy society he made requests under the Data Protection Act asking public bodies and companies for copies of all his stored information. What they returned gives a rather alarmingly comprehensive and detailed image of his person.

It also underlines that data privacy is not so much under threat by state surveillance or by companies’ hunger for consumer data as rather by their parallel efforts that can be combined (e.g. data retention).

Read the full Mirror article.

Tweak your Facebook privacy settings

After stumbling again over Michael Zimmer’s step-to-step guide for adjusting the privacy settings I wanted to review my own Facebook settings, quite confident they would be up to a high level. Dear me, was I wrong. All doors were wide open, so I quickly shut them.

Facebook allows you to tweak your privacy settings for different types of information quite extensively, and it is recommendable to make use of it. As the implications of the settings are sometimes not completely obvious, here are two guides (one of them the above mentioned) to adjust the Facebook privacy settings:

• “How to Adjust your Facebook Privacy Settings”
• “10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know”

The EU Commission steps in

The EU Commission has obviously set data privacy and its implementation in the Member States on its agenda. A few days ago the European Commission announced that it had initiated legal action against Britain regarding the online advertising technology Phorm and made it clear that Britain needed to change its law.

Yesterday the Commission said that it will take action against Member States that do not adequately protect their citizens’ privacy against threats from new technologies. Along with RFID chips it especially mentioned the use of social networking.

Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding is quoted in Out-law.com stressing the importance of privacy of minors and ‘threatening’ the regulation of social networking:

“Privacy must in my view be a high priority for social networking providers and their users,” she said. “I firmly believe that at least the profiles of minors must be private by default and unavailable to internet search engines. The European Commission has already called on social networking sites to deal with minors’ profiles carefully, by means of self-regulation. I am ready to follow this up with new rules if I have to.”

Total car surveillance

Four years ago, working for the Data Protection Authority of Baselland in Switzerland, I wrote an article in its newsletter about the total car surveillance system in the United Arab Emirates. The article was meant to depict an extreme and almost unconceivable example of how far surveillance can go. Today, the Guardian reveals that EU officials in fact consider a similar surveillance system in Europe: Every car will send a constant “heartbeat” indicating its location, speed and direction of travel.

The purported purposes are the reduction of accidents, congestion and carbon emissions. However, it can be predicted with great certainty that these data will be used for the prevention of terrorism, crime and – knowing the typical ‘function creep’ development – for the prevention or detection of minor offences as well.

More details about SNS data retention

More coverage on the UK government’s plans to expand data retention on social networking sites today in the Guardian and the Independent.

The scope of the data recording becomes a tiny bit clearer. According to the statements of a spokeman in the Guardian article, not the content but only the communication data should be recorded (by the providers).

Data retention for social networking sites is just one example of the dangerous combination of the state’s insatiable appetite for data and the vast amount of data stored in private databases. How long until the Government demands direct access to Tesco’s clubcard data, credit card information and our Amazon profiles?

Criticism is not only given by politicians and pressure groups like Liberty, but also by Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, who told the Independent that Facebook was considering lobbying ministers over the proposal, which he called “overkill”.

P.S. (26 March): Out-Law.com provides more information, particularly on the question if content will be saved as well. Home Office security minister Vernon Coaker apparently does not exclude that option.

Sitting in your virtual living room

How do you like the prospect of a secret service agent sitting in your living room, noting every single phone call and letter of yours, writing down TV programmes you watch and assiduously recording your chats with friends and family?

What sound like an idea straight out of Orwell’s dystopia “1984″ could in fact become reality in our virtual life. According to ZDNet the UK government seems convinced that the EU data retention policy to record all communications traffic data (not its content) is insufficient. Accordingly, the government considers to additionally record all user communication on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Without having an expert knowledge of the EU Data Retention Directive I venture to heavily doubt the legality of such a programme. It goes far beyond the required measures of the Directive and is in its disproportionality not reconcilable with the right to (data) privacy.