Peter A Clarke

The Steve Tyler Act (really a bill)  passed through the Hawaii Senate yesterday according to a report ‘Steven Tyler Act’ passed by Hawaii Senate for celebrity privacy.

 I have posted on the bill here. It is now to be reviewed, debated and voted upon in the lower house.

It is a significant legislative response to provide persons (not just celebrities) with civil redress against unwanted and unreasonable intrusion into their privacy. Unfortunately it tends to be a piecemeal solution to a more significant problem. It is an advance on the state of Australian law where the likely remedy is nuisance or breach of confidence, not a particularly satisfactory response.

The article provides:

Social networking sites can be, and usually are, corrosive of an individuals privacy.  Not that users are not complicit in acting against their best interests; messing up their privacy settings (which are often confusing and contradictory) and just putting out into the social network sphere that which should reasonably be kept private. But social networks are the prime abusers of privacy and their use of information to data mine is an appalling abuse of its user’s rights.

In Path’s Dave Morin at SXSW: “‘We Wanted to Build the Apple of the Internet.” Vanity Fair, briefly, looks into a different approach taken by the Social Network Path.

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As with drone technology google glasses is technology that has been known about for some time (see Take a peek through Google glasses (photos)) but regarded as experimental and almost an abstract concept.  No longer.  As the recent Zdnet article Google Glass: You’ll kiss your privacy goodbye, and you won’t mind a bit makes clear it is viable and on the cusp of public usage, with a release date expected in 2014.

The privacy issues are clear.  The solution is less so.  What is necessary is the need for the legislature to provide a framework within which the technology can operate but provide some privacy safeguards and, at minimum, control of the use of the data obtained through the use of the glasses, stored and possibly cross matched against a data bank.  The Privacy Act is an imperfect means to doing so at the moment.  Common law and equitable actions would provide limited assistance to an individual.

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The Atlantic is an excellent publication that inhabits the intersection of scholarly publication and current affairs commentary.  Why Does Privacy Matter? One Scholar’s Answer is a typical example of this form of writing.  It addresses some of the core issues why privacy matters.  It is comforting, in a depressing sort of way, to see the US legislative privacy protections lag as badly as that in Australia.

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Our privacy is now at risk in unprecedented ways, but Read the rest of this entry »

The ABC, per Mark Corcoran, undertakes the latest detailed analysis of Drones,  This time, in Drones set for large-scale commercial take-off the issue is that the Civil Aviation Authority is about to provide rules to permit the use of drones.

It provides:

Hundreds of small commercially operated drones could soon take to Australian skies under a radical new set of rules proposed by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) in Melbourne this week.

Under a new weight class system, prospective drone entrepreneurs with craft weighing 2 kilograms or less could take off after completing nothing more than an online application form.

CASA officials say Read the rest of this entry »

On 12 February the ICO  issued the Nursery and Midwifery Council a £150,000 fine for breaching the data Protection Act.

The council lost three DVDs related to a nurse’s misconduct hearing, which contained confidential personal information and evidence from two vulnerable children. The  ICO  found the information was not encrypted.

According to the ICO press release David Smith, Deputy Commissioner and Director of Data Protection, said:

“It would be nice to think that data breaches of this type are rare, but we’re seeing incidents of personal data being mishandled again and again.
While many organisations are aware of the need to keep sensitive paper records secure, they forget Read the rest of this entry »

I have been posting on drone technology regularly, in the context of their privacy (not to mention other tortious) implications on members of the public.  The current edition of Time Magazine has undertaken a very extensive article on drones in Drone Home.

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A few months ago I borrowed a drone from a company called Parrot. Officially the drone is called an AR.Drone 2.0, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re just going to call it the Parrot. The Parrot went on sale last May and retails for about $300.

It’s a quadcopter, meaning it’s a miniature helicopter with four rotors; basically it looks like a giant four-leaf clover designed by Darth Vader. It’s noisy and a bit fussy: it spits error messages at you from a comprehensive menu of them, and it recovers from catastrophes slowly and sulkily. (Pro tip: quadcopters mix poorly with greenery.) But when it’s on its best behavior, the Parrot is a little marvel. You control it with an app on your smart phone, to which it feeds real-time video in return. Mashing the Take Off button causes it to leap up to waist height and hover there, stock still, in the manner of Harry Potter’s broomstick. It’s so firmly autostabilized that on a hot day small children will gather under it to get the cool downwash from its rotors.

It’s a toy, the robotic equivalent of a house pet. But just as cats and dogs are related to tigers and wolves, the Parrot is recognizably genetically related to some very efficient killers.

Flying a drone, even just a Read the rest of this entry »

In Rock stars Tyler, Fleetwood help push celeb privacy bill forward in Hawaii; testify at hearing the Washington Post reports on the progress of a bill in the Hawaii legislature to limit paparazzi from taking photos of civilians (read celebrities) where they have reasonable expectation of privacy. The bill is found here.

The article provides:

HONOLULU — Rock legends Steven Tyler and Mick Fleetwood convinced a Hawaii Senate committee on Friday to approve a bill to protect celebrities or anyone else from intrusive paparazzi.

The state Senate Judiciary Committee approved the so-called Steven Tyler Act after the stars testified at a hearing, saying they want to fiercely protect the little privacy they have as public figures.

The bill would give people Read the rest of this entry »

The use of drones has sped from exclusive military usage to availability by citizens in a matter of a few years.  The cost, size and feasability of technology is now within reach of citizens.  That means they are well within the reach of governments for domestic uses, obviously including as part of a policing approach.  This development has involved precious little policy considerations and little regulation.  In Australia there is no privacy protection relating to the use of drones, notwithstanding the obvious issues.  It is a case of technology fast outpacing the law’s need to regulate in order to protect competing rights and interests.

Charlottesville has reportedly restricted the use of aerial drones (report found here).

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This week, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia became the first city in the US to limit the use of unmanned aerial drones. Drafted Read the rest of this entry »

 That The Australian has a fear, dread and loathing of any form of a statutory right to privacy is no secret.  The Legal Affairs section  has occasional, bordering on regular, pieces by a range of commentators who run the usual complaints about such a tort.  Today the angle (on page one and five) is an interview with the new Attorney General under the banner Dreyfus sees free speech risk in privacy law (behind the pay wall).  From this exchange the august paper, through its Legal Affairs editor Chris Merritt (a consistent and longstanding critic of a statutory right to privacy), takes some comfort that such a tort may not be in the offing.

 It provides (with some notations):

Incoming attorney-general Mark  Dreyfus has expressed personal concern about the risk to freedom of speech from legislation that encourages people to sue each other for invasions of privacy.

Mr Dreyfus, who is replacing Nicola Roxon as the nation’s first law officer, said countries that had created  a  statutory  method  of suing for privacy had failed to achieve the right balance with freedom of speech. “Legislation in an effective way to protect privacy while at the same time not unduly affecting freedom of speech has proved to be a very difficult task,”

On its face this reportage the Attorney General seems to be less than supportive about a statutory tort of privacy.  It is frustrating that there is no reference as to which jurisdictions which have a statutory “method of suing for privacy” have failed to achieve the right balance with freedom of speech.

Mr Dreyfus said “In jurisdictions where they have had legislation I don’t think they have got the balance exactly right yet.” Mr Dreyfus’s remarks, in an interview with The Australian, provide the second indication within a week that the government could be seeking to address concerns about its approach to free speech.

This of course does not preclude the Government from introducing the statutory right to privacy and claiming it gets the balance right. If he is referring to legislation in continental Europe he is probably correct in his concerns, at least from a common law perspective. The UK does not have a statutory right to privacy but Article 8 and 10 does in effect Read the rest of this entry »