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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Beschwerde gegen französische Biometrie-Pässe nach 2 Jah...

It took more than two years after the complaint against the French biometric passport was filed to have the conclusions of the "public rapporteur" publicly presented at the Conseil d'Etat (French highest administrative Court), on 30 June 2010.

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Deutsch: Yahoo muss belgischen Behörden keine personenbezogenen Daten übergeb...

The Belgian Court of Appeal of Gand ruled on 30 June 2010 that Yahoo was not obliged to hand over personal data of its users to the Belgian authorities, in a case where the first instance had issued a contrary ruling.

In 2009, following a cybercrime investigation by the Belgian police, it was discovered that a group was using Yahoo e-mail addresses to commit online fraud. The members of the group stole data from various companies and used the data to order goods without paying.

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Deutsch: Auf Facebook warten in Deutschland hohe Geldstrafen

The Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information John Caspar has launched legal proceedings against the operator of the social network Facebook for illegally accessing and saving personal data of people who don't use the respective social networking site.

"We consider the saving of data from third parties, in this context, to be against personal data laws," said Caspar.

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Deutsch: Europäisches Parlament stimmt SWIFT-Abkommen zu

The European Parliament has adopted the so-called SWIFT agreement on 8 July 2010 allowing sharing EU citizens' bank data with the US authorities, but failing to stick to its initial position on privacy safeguards from February 2010.

The text was adopted with 484 votes in favour and 109 against. The supporters of the current version claim that the new text was significantly improved by gaining a number of important concessions from the US.

European Digital Rights has prepared a "frequently asked questions" document to explain the changes between the SWIFT agreement previously rejected by the European Parliament and the current text under discussion.

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Deutsch: Neues SWIFT-Abkommen: wieder die selben Privatsphäre-Bedenken

The agreement between the EU and USA on the transfer of bank data through SWIFT was signed on 28 June 2010 after the Spanish Presidency of the Council of Ministers has accepted some of the changes on the text proposed by MEPs, but with no significant improvements from the Agreement rejected by the European Parliament in February 2010.

The text of the new SWIFT Agreement will now probably be rushed through the next European Parliament plenary session in Strasbourg (5-8 July).

After the draft agreement was initiated by Commissioner Cecilia Malmström on 10 June, MEPs asked for changes to the text concerning t

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Kehrtwende der neuen britischen Koalition

The coalition Government plans to keep the Summary Care Record, despite pre-election pledges by both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to rip up the system - which is not compliant with the I v Finland judgement of the European Court of Human Rights.

Last year colleagues and I wrote Database State, a report for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, which studied 46 systems that keep information on all of us, or at least a significant minority of us. We concluded that eleven of them were almost certainly illegal under human-rights law, and most of the rest had problems.

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Deutsch: Mazedonien: Zivilgesellschaft fordert Respekt vor Privatsphäre

On 11 June 2010, fifteen Macedonian civil society organizations reacted to the threats to privacy and democracy contained in the Draft Law amending the Law on Electronic Communications, calling for the withdrawal of the text from parliamentary procedure.

The call has been supported by more than 365 citizens so far, including prominent solicitors and other intellectuals, and was prepared based on expert analyses, taking into account the views of relevant stakeholders, especially NGOs dealing with human rights protection, expressed in public and at the round table "Privacy in Macedonia" held on 4 June 2010