Day: 14 October 2010

Freedom of speech in China

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14 October 2010

21:53

2 Comments on Freedom of speech in China

China

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This is a privacy blog, however there are times when the right to freedom of speech and personal privacy overlap somewhat. Hence I am sure that I am not alone in feeling delighted at the award of the Nobel prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波).

There is more: on October 11, 23 Chinese Communist Party elders known for their pro-reform positions, including Mao Zedong’s former secretary Li Rui (李锐) and former People’s Daily editor-in-chief Hu Jiwei (胡绩伟), submitted an open letter to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, formally China’s highest state body, calling for an end to restrictions on expression in China. Read more at the China Media Project.

And where is your personal data in the cloud?

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14 October 2010

13:01

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Information Privacy

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I’ve been working an awful lot on security and privacy in the cloud lately, surprise surprise ;-), and the thing that is really an interesting problem when it comes to the privacy of data being held, is precisely where the data is physically? This presents some challenges, for example not many countries outside of the EU have equivalent privacy legislation implemented, so if personal data from the EU is stored in the cloud, the hosting country needs to have equivalent legislation or some workaround to protect data both physically and legally. ComputerWeekly.com have a pretty good high level article on this. Also to get a feel of how privacy legislation is working worldwide. The article (p.17) published by ISSA (December 2009, and reprinted later by IAPP July 2010) may be a worthwhile background read. Be aware that there has been an update to this directive since, e.g. the “cookie directive”. I will publish more on this later.