UK News
Insights from the UK and beyond
Do you object to Google Street View?
Google’s “Street View” service has survived calls to have it shut down. The UK’s privacy watchdog has ruled that removing the service, which allows users to navigate around a 360-degree view of streets and houses in 25 cities, would be “disproportionate to the relatively small risk of privacy detriment.”
Google promised to obscure images of pedestrians or car licence plates but some slipped through the net. The media reported a number of embarrassing images including a man walking out of a sex shop and another being sick outside a pub.
The residents of one village, meanwhile, tried to block the cameras, claiming the service would allow burglars to scope out their homes. The campaign group Privacy International complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
A spokesperson for the ICO said: “Google Street View does not contravene the Data Protection Act and, in any case, it is not in the public interest to turn the digital clock back.
The phuss over Phorm
The targeted online advertising company Phorm, which has been accused of spying, breaking the law and just about everything else in the last year, has launched its latest charm offensive in its battle to prove its innocence.
The British company sparked damning headlines last year when it signed up the three biggest Internet service providers BT, Virgin Media and Carphone Warehouse to provide adverts to Web
sites based on the surfing trends of users.
Is the DNA database too big?
Whose DNA is it anyway?
A “citizens’ inquiry” instigated by the Human Genetics Commission, a government advisory body, wants the records of people who have not been convicted, or whose convictions are long spent, to be deleted from the forensic National DNA Database and says the whole archive should be overseen by an independent body.
The database was established in 1995 in Britain – the country where scientists first pioneered the technique of DNA fingerprinting.
Max Mosley’s “hanky spanky”: titillation or public interest?
Motor racing chief Max Mosley has won his privacy case against the News of the World, after a High Court judge backed his claim that the paper had no right to print details of his sado-masochistic orgies.
The News of the World had reported that Mosley, President of Formula One’s governing body and son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, had taken part in a “sick Nazi orgy”.
Max Mosley’s “unfortunate interest”
FIA motorsport head Max Mosley is suing the News of the World in the wake of its revelations that he held sado-masochistic spanking sessions with prostitutes.
He is not alleging libel but breach of privacy, saying that although he had practised what he called his “unfortunate interest” for some 45 years, it was his business and his alone and had no bearing on his professional position.
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The Wall
