ePrivacy Directive

The European Council of Ministers have now published a proposed text for the General Data Protection Regulation. This still needs to be edited by the Commission's "lawyer-linguists" to check for inconsistencies, sort out the numbering of recitals and articles etc. But the working parties of both the Parliament and the Council have recommended that the resulting text should be adopted by the respective full bodies at meetings in the next couple of months.

A recent news story reported that a small number of litter bins in London were collecting a unique identifier from passing mobile phones and using these for some sort of "footfall analysis". There doesn’t seem to be much detail about the plans: it struck me that a helpful application could perhaps be look for the same phone passing slowly and repeatedly past, and display an "are you lost?" map on the bin’s advertising screen!

A wide-ranging panel discussion at the TERENA Networking Conference considered the stability of the Internet routing system at all levels from technology to regulation. The conclusion seemed to be that at the moment the Internet is stable because two systems, technical and human, compensate effectively for each others’ failings. While improvements to increase stability may be possible, they must beware of disrupting the current balance or introducing new ways that it can fail.

The International Chamber of Commerce has published a revised version of its Cookie Guide, reflecting the new information that has been produced by the Information Commissioner and Article 29 Working Party since