News

Data protection regulations and compliance

• December 01, 2021 01 Dec'21

  Unesco member states adopt AI ethics recommendation

  The non-binding recommendation seeks to define a common set of values and principles to guide the development of ethical AI globally

• November 30, 2021 30 Nov'21

  Over 100 civil society groups call for changes to EU AI Act

  Civil, human and digital rights organisations sign open letter calling on European policymakers to put fundamental rights at the heart of the proposed Artificial Intelligence Act

• November 12, 2021 12 Nov'21

  New law needed to rein in AI-powered workplace surveillance

  MPs and peers call for new legislation to regulate the growing use of artificial intelligence in the workplace, which is being used to surveil workers’ performance and behaviour

• November 12, 2021 12 Nov'21

  Oversight of biometrics and surveillance should not go to ICO

  Biometrics and surveillance camera commissioner Fraser Sampson has panned the UK government’s proposed plan to absorb the functions of those roles under the remit of the information commissioner

• November 09, 2021 09 Nov'21

  Yoti develops age estimation algorithm for under-13s

  Age estimation technology developed by Yoti is being pitched as a way of helping social media platforms and other online businesses protect younger internet users from harm

• November 08, 2021 08 Nov'21

  Gig economy workforce nearly trebles over five years

  Over four million people in England and Wales now work for gig economy platforms at least once a week, marking a nearly threefold increase since 2016

• November 03, 2021 03 Nov'21

  Facebook self-imposes facial recognition moratorium

  Facebook and Meta have committed to halting their use of facial recognition technology and deleting the biometric data of more than a billion people by the end of 2021, but will retain the underlying algorithms and software for potential use in ...

• October 27, 2021 27 Oct'21

  Cohesity beefs up ransomware and disaster recovery offer

  Disaster Recovery as-a-service, Data Govern and project Fort Knox available or in development as data protection supplier augments its portfolio with ransomware firmly in mind

• October 22, 2021 22 Oct'21

  MEPs vote to expand Europol data mandate

  The European Parliament has voted in favour of expanding Europol’s mandate to process data and develop AI tools, but critics claim it contradicts a previous vote which opposed using new technologies to predict crime

• October 12, 2021 12 Oct'21

  Ban UK police use of facial-recognition, House of Lords told

  Experts giving evidence to the House of Lords have said that UK police use of facial-recognition technology is disproportionate and ineffective, and further questioned the utility of algorithmic crime ‘prediction’ tools

• October 11, 2021 11 Oct'21

  Malaysia’s highway authority improves DR capabilities

  The Malaysian Highway Authority is now more resilient against cyber attacks through a local disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering powered by Veeam software

• October 07, 2021 07 Oct'21

  ICO expresses concerns over its future independence

  In its response to the government’s data protection consultation, the Information Commissioner’s Office has raised worries over its future ability to function independently of government interference

• October 01, 2021 01 Oct'21

  Met Police purchase new retrospective facial-recognition system

  Retrospective facial-recognition software purchased for £3m by the Met Police will be deployed in coming months amid continuing controversy around the use of biometric technologies by law enforcement bodies

• September 28, 2021 28 Sep'21

  Digital regulators need discrete but cooperative remits

  The UK’s information commissioner has told MPs that digital economy regulators need discrete remits backed up by strong information sharing powers to both provide clear focus as well as allow for greater cooperation between their disparate but ...

• September 27, 2021 27 Sep'21

  GCP gets triple-redundant NAS and built-in Kubernetes backup

  Google Filestore Enterprise will provide synchronous replication across three zones, while Backup for Google Kubernetes Engine brings built-in container cluster data protection

• September 20, 2021 20 Sep'21

  NGO Fair Trials calls on EU to ban predictive policing systems

  The use of artificial intelligence to predict criminal behaviour should be banned because of its discriminatory outcomes and high risk of further entrenching existing inequalities, claims Fair Trials

• September 15, 2021 15 Sep'21

  UN human rights chief calls for moratorium on AI technologies

  High commissioner’s call for a moratorium on the use of AI systems that pose a serious risk to human rights is accompanied by a UN report on the negative human rights impacts associated with the technology

• August 27, 2021 27 Aug'21

  Are proposed data protection changes a threat to UK citizens’ privacy?

  Though changes are as-yet undefined pending an upcoming consultation, concerns are already being expressed over the government’s plan to liberalise data protection laws in the service of innovation and growth

• August 26, 2021 26 Aug'21

  Government unveils post-Brexit data flow proposals

  The government will pursue data partnerships with countries including Australia, South Korea and the US as part of a post-Brexit data regime that may also see substantial changes to the UK’s data protection law

• August 26, 2021 26 Aug'21

  NZ privacy lead John Edwards named new information commissioner

  DCMS has named John Edwards, currently New Zealand privacy commissioner, to succeed Elizabeth Denham as UK information commissioner

• August 24, 2021 24 Aug'21

  Over a million opt out of NHS data-sharing

  Failure to communicate benefits of data-sharing proposals and privacy concerns are prompting large numbers of people to opt out of a proposed NHS Digital scheme

• August 23, 2021 23 Aug'21

  Veeam survey: Big cloud impact on backup and disaster recovery

  Backup specialist finds cloud eclipses on-site compute for all workloads while DR makes big strides in the cloud despite concerns about complexity and security

• August 19, 2021 19 Aug'21

  Pub apps harvesting swathes of customer data unnecessarily

  Some pub and restaurant chain apps demand data such as gender and marital status, raising eyebrows among privacy campaigners

• July 28, 2021 28 Jul'21

  Almost half unaware of GP data-sharing plans

  Around half of adults in England – approximately 20 million people – remain unaware of the scope of the NHS GPDPR programme, prompting calls for a public education campaign

• July 13, 2021 13 Jul'21

  Secureworks sets up in EU datacentre for XDR services

  New datacentre location helps Secureworks’ customers meet EU data residency requirements

• June 23, 2021 23 Jun'21

  City of York picks Barracuda Networks for data protection

  York Council needed to refresh its backup service to bring new security protections after it went ‘all-in’ on Microsoft Office 365

• June 18, 2021 18 Jun'21

  UK taskforce calls for cutting GDPR protections

  The UK’s Taskforce on Innovation, Growth and Regulatory Reform has recommended scrapping safeguards against automated decision-making contained in the General Data Protection Regulation

• June 15, 2021 15 Jun'21

  The Security Interviews: How to build a government model to ‘hack for good’

  Kyle Hanslovan started Huntress to give back after a career in the intelligence sector. After US authorities took action to help people hit by the Microsoft Exchange attacks, we discussed how governments can ‘hack for good’

• June 09, 2021 09 Jun'21

  Cohesity brings DataProtect backup-as-a-service to Europe via AWS

  Scale-out backup appliance pioneer adds backup-as-a-service from a virtual machine on customer premises

• June 08, 2021 08 Jun'21

  NHS Digital delays data collection plans until September

  NHS Digital has postponed its proposed collection of GP data for two months, to allow more time for the public to understand the process and opt out if wanted

• June 08, 2021 08 Jun'21

  National data guardian calls for dialogue on NHS Digital GP plans

  The UK’s national data guardian says it is important the public has clarity on how their confidential medical information will be used and kept secure under NHS data-sharing plans

• June 07, 2021 07 Jun'21

  EU privacy chief investigates use of US cloud services

  Use of Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud services by public sector bodies in the European Union is being scrutinised by the bloc’s privacy watchdog

• June 07, 2021 07 Jun'21

  IBM pushes back against US government data requests

  Technology giant IBM says the US government has ‘no jurisdiction’ to request data from its European entities

• June 07, 2021 07 Jun'21

  Campaigners plan legal action over NHS data sharing

  Privacy coalition aims to force NHS Digital to push back its plans to scrape medical information on millions of patients into a central database

• June 04, 2021 04 Jun'21

  UK immigration exemption in Data Protection Act found unlawful

  Court of Appeal rules immigration exemption unlawful, but further hearings will follow to decide what remedies must be put in place

• June 04, 2021 04 Jun'21

  BCS: Lack of communication over NHS GPDPR ‘astonishing’

  The Chartered Institute for IT has warned that millions of people are not being properly informed of NHS Digital plans to harvest their data

• June 03, 2021 03 Jun'21

  Tories fined over email data protection breaches

  The Conservative Party broke the law by failing to properly keep records of who had unsubscribed from its mailing list

• June 01, 2021 01 Jun'21

  Exagrid pays $2.6m to Conti ransomware attackers

  Backup appliance specialist hit by Conti ransomware in May with cyber criminals downloading employee and customer data, confidential contracts and source code

• May 28, 2021 28 May'21

  Privacy experts concerned over NHS data collection plans

  Security and data privacy experts warn NHS Digital that its data collection plans could increase risk and cause a public backlash

• May 26, 2021 26 May'21

  More data stolen in January 2021 than in all of 2017, says report

  The volume of data being stolen through breaches is growing steadily and shows no sign of slowing, according to a report from Imperva

• May 25, 2021 25 May'21

  Oil and gas firm halves backup licence cost with Hycu move

  Summit E&P made a strategic move to Nutanix hyper-converged and away from NetApp and VMware and wanted backup that could handle virtual machines and physical servers

• May 25, 2021 25 May'21

  Threat of group GDPR legal action haunts CISOs

  The vast majority of security leaders questioned for a new report say they are concerned about the possibility of group legal settlements against them following a serious data breach

• May 25, 2021 25 May'21

  Industry reflects on three years of GDPR

  Looking back on 12 tumultuous months, we assess how GDPR has weathered the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit, and consider what the coming year may hold for data protection

• May 19, 2021 19 May'21

  Reports of stolen Irish health service data being leaked online

  Leaking of deeply confidential and personal information on patient healthcare marks a new low for the criminal Conti gang

• May 18, 2021 18 May'21

  Microsoft EU Data Boundary dubbed ‘smoke and mirrors’

  Data protection experts claim Microsoft’s decision to create an EU Data Boundary is a tacit admission that it routinely transfers and processes the personal data of European citizens outside the bloc

• May 06, 2021 06 May'21

  Scammers accidentally reveal fake Amazon review data

  More than 13 million records relating to an organised fake review scam have been found on an unsecured ElasticSearch database, implicating hundreds of thousands of people in unethical behaviour

• April 29, 2021 29 Apr'21

  G7 countries to cooperate on digital regulation

  Digital and technology ministers outline their agenda for how technology can be used to facilitate the post-Covid recovery, signalling closer collaboration in key areas of the digital economy

• April 28, 2021 28 Apr'21

  NHS App to serve as vaccine passport for foreign holidays

  Existing NHS App will have vaccine passport functionality added to it, transport secretary confirms

• April 27, 2021 27 Apr'21

  Leaky Azure storage account puts software developer IP at risk

  Source code for multiple products was left exposed in an unsecured Microsoft Azure cloud storage account, say researchers, but attributing responsibility for the error has proved difficult

• April 15, 2021 15 Apr'21

  Ireland’s DPC launches probe into Facebook leak

  The Irish Data Protection Commission has launched an ‘own volition’ inquiry into the leak of data from 500 million Facebook profiles

• April 06, 2021 06 Apr'21

  Facebook data leak could be outside scope of GDPR

  Regulators may be unable to do much about leaked data on 533 million Facebook users, as it seems to have been stolen before GDPR came into force

• March 29, 2021 29 Mar'21

  Backup survey: UK councils’ downtimes five times longer than average

  Backup product supplier Veeam’s freedom of information request finds councils’ average downtime is seven hours and that backup and disaster recovery testing is not done frequently

• March 24, 2021 24 Mar'21

  IWM uses StorCycle to free capacity for all-flash SAN upgrade

  Imperial War Museums set to embark on unstructured data archiving project that will archive cold data to tape and free up capacity for a move to IntelliFlash all-flash SAN

• March 18, 2021 18 Mar'21

  Survey: Backup failures hit a high as pandemic working hits home

  Veeam survey finds distributed working plus operations that span on-prem and the cloud the background to high numbers of failures in backup and restore, with 40% of SLAs not met

• March 17, 2021 17 Mar'21

  Digital Green Certificate proposed for travel in Europe

  Digital Green Certificates will supposedly help re-establish freedom of movement within the European Union

• March 16, 2021 16 Mar'21

  Government calls for input into Covid-19 vaccine passports

  Evidence gathering exercise will inform the development of the UK’s proposed Covid-19 vaccine passport scheme

• March 12, 2021 12 Mar'21

  CW Innovation Awards: Fighting fake Covid-19 vaccines with blockchain

  A blockchain-based system developed by Singapore-based Zuellig Pharma can help governments and healthcare providers weed out fake vaccines and manage vaccine distribution and administration

• March 11, 2021 11 Mar'21

  UK digital regulators set out plans to strengthen cooperation

  Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum outlines plans for the coming year, marking a shift towards a more collaborative regulatory approach

• March 10, 2021 10 Mar'21

  Met Police chooses Capgemini as strategic IT infrastructure services provider

  Capgemini has a history of providing the force with day-to-day technology services, and will now deliver its infrastructure services under the Pegasus programme

• March 04, 2021 04 Mar'21

  Veritas looks beyond NetBackup for growth in ASEAN

  Veritas has seen increased demand for its availability tools as it looks to address backup and recovery requirements from cloud, database and VMware workloads

• March 03, 2021 03 Mar'21

  UK’s Arkivum up for €4.8m EU science data archive project

  CERN-led multi-petabyte scale research data archive bid will use Google cloud and compete with AWS-based and open source designs from other providers Libnova and Onedata

• March 03, 2021 03 Mar'21

  SME backup: Card maker ditches tape-only for Nakivo 3-2-1 setup

  IG Design Group gains a modern backup regime with data held on disk, in the cloud and long-term on tape in a move that has helped it to slash backup and restore times

• February 24, 2021 24 Feb'21

  Arcserve and StorageCraft merger aims for ‘single pane of glass’

  Arcserve and StorageCraft bring a lot of similarities but enough differences for their backers to bet on with their merger, with unifying management between product sets the only priority currently stated

• February 24, 2021 24 Feb'21

  Veeam v11 adds continuous data protection and cloud archive

  Backup specialist’s annual upgrade brings continuous data protection to offer better RPOs and RTOs than existing snapshot functionality and without impact on running processes

• February 21, 2021 21 Feb'21

  Dell to invest $50m in Singapore innovation hub

  Dell Technologies’ global innovation hub will house a research and development lab and other facilities to drive development and adoption of emerging technologies

• February 01, 2021 01 Feb'21

  Netbackup 9 adds flexibility with hyper-converged backup options

  Veritas’s enterprise backup flagship is available in hyper-converged infrastructure and has embraced containerisation, for better hardware and application scalability

• January 31, 2021 31 Jan'21

  Indian firms see growing value of data

  Half of Indian IT leaders see a permanent increase in value of data as their organisations come under threat from mounting cyber attacks amid the pandemic

• January 29, 2021 29 Jan'21

  Human factor dominates Australia’s latest data breach numbers

  The number of data breaches resulting from human error increased by 18% in the second half of 2020, according to Australian government’s latest notifiable data breaches report

• January 28, 2021 28 Jan'21

  Nakivo to use AWS Object Lock as anti-ransomware tool

  Backup software maker leverages AWS Object Lock’s ability to create immutable WORM repositories as a means of helping organisations protect against malicious deletion or corruption

• January 27, 2021 27 Jan'21

  Pandemic response has improved privacy posture, says Cisco

  Data privacy seems to be ‘coming of age’ to some extent and organisational responses to Covid-19 may be partly responsible, according to a report

• January 27, 2021 27 Jan'21

  Grindr complaint results in €9.6m GDPR fine

  Norway’s data protection authority plans to apply a fine totalling 10% of LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr’s revenues over its data sharing practices

• January 26, 2021 26 Jan'21

  Conservatives broke data law to racially profile millions

  The Conservative Party acted illegally in collecting data that inferred voters’ ethnicity and religious background, a Select Committee has heard

• January 26, 2021 26 Jan'21

  ICO extends commissioner Denham’s term of office

  Extension of Elizabeth Denham’s tenure as information commissioner will give the government more time to appoint her successor

• January 22, 2021 22 Jan'21

  ICO resumes adtech investigation

  The UK Information Commissioner’s Office was criticised for ending its investigation into alleged malpractice in advertising technology, but has now resumed its probe

• January 19, 2021 19 Jan'21

  Value of GDPR fines shows dramatic increase in 2020

  European regulators imposed almost €160m worth of fines during the past 12 months, a substantial rise

• January 18, 2021 18 Jan'21

  MoD reports 18% rise in data loss incidents

  The Ministry of Defence reported more than five hundred data security incidents in 2019-20, with seven serious enough to warrant disclosure to the ICO

• January 15, 2021 15 Jan'21

  150,000 records accidentally wiped from police systems

  Home Office claims data wiped from national police systems only relates to people who have never been convicted of a crime or had further police action taken against them following an arrest

• January 15, 2021 15 Jan'21

  Coalition proposes secure standard model for Covid-19 passports

  Vaccination Credential Initiative is working to ensure that people vaccinated against Covid-19 can access their records in a secure, verifiable and privacy-preserving way

• January 08, 2021 08 Jan'21

  Major facial-recognition supplier builds system to identify masked faces

  Facial-recognition supplier claims new system can accurately identify masked faces, therefore promoting public health during the pandemic. But questions remain about whether its existing UK law enforcement clients will be deploying the technology

• January 08, 2021 08 Jan'21

  Brexit deal grants UK temporary data adequacy

  The EU-UK Brexit deal has granted the UK temporary data adequacy to allow for the continued flow of data across borders, but the agreement has divided data protection experts

• January 07, 2021 07 Jan'21

  Hackney Council data leaked by Pysa ransomware gang

  Council data stolen in October is leaked online in a double extortion attack

• December 18, 2020 18 Dec'20

  Utility supplier People’s Energy has entire customer list stolen

  All 270,000 customers of People’s Energy, a renewable energy startup, have had their details compromised in a major data breach incident

• December 07, 2020 07 Dec'20

  HMRC referred 11 data security incidents to ICO in 2019-20

  HM Revenue & Customs shares details of a number of data security incidents that occurred during the 2019-20 financial year in its annual report

• November 17, 2020 17 Nov'20

  Kaspersky shuts down data-processing activities in Russia

  Cyber security provider’s data storage and processing activities for customers in Europe, the US and Canada, have now been fully relocated to Switzerland

• November 10, 2020 10 Nov'20

  Leaky AWS S3 bucket once again at centre of data breach

  Prestige Software exposed millions of records after failing to pay attention to the security of its cloud instances

• November 10, 2020 10 Nov'20

  IT Priorities 2020: Covid-19 consolidates storage push to cloud

  The emphasis on home and remote working has been felt in storage and backup as in all areas of IT, with continued evolution towards the cloud and as-a-service storage and backup

• November 10, 2020 10 Nov'20

  IT Priorities 2020: After Covid-19, security goes back to basics

  This year’s transition to remote working highlighted big gaps in the fundamentals of security, as updated TechTarget/Computer Weekly data reveals

• November 06, 2020 06 Nov'20

  ICO sued over ‘failure’ to address ad industry practices

  Privacy campaigner the Open Rights Group claims the advertising technology industry is systematically breaching the GDPR, and the ICO is doing nothing about it

• November 05, 2020 05 Nov'20

  Slot of the Antarctic: Tape the best option for polar survey backup

  Tape deemed the best medium for backup on board the Antarctic research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough, with Quantum’s Scalar i3 chosen in a fully redundant deployment

• November 03, 2020 03 Nov'20

  GDPR lawsuit against Oracle and Salesforce moves forward

  Class action suit seeks claims worth more than £10bn over the processing of personal information

• November 01, 2020 01 Nov'20

  How Snowflake is charting its growth in APAC

  The cloud data warehouse supplier set foot in Asia-Pacific just three years ago and has started to gain traction among large enterprises in Singapore, India and Southeast Asia

• October 27, 2020 27 Oct'20

  Commvault launches Metallic backup service in Europe

  Backup giant adds backup as a service, with cloud-to-cloud backup and e-discovery functionality that can work across on-site datacentres and the AWS and Azure clouds

• October 27, 2020 27 Oct'20

  ICO slams Experian over ‘invisible’ data processing

  Data processing practices used by Experian broke data protection law, says Information Commissioner’s Office

• October 20, 2020 20 Oct'20

  BA breach penalty sets new GDPR precedents

  The 90% reduction in the fine levied on BA over a 2018 data breach has legal experts talking about the ramifications for the future of data protection

• October 16, 2020 16 Oct'20

  BA argues ICO data breach fine down to £20m

  Information Commissioner’s Office levies fine of £20m on British Airways for failing to protect the personal data of hundreds of thousands of passengers – a vast reduction on the initial £183m penalty

• October 15, 2020 15 Oct'20

  Cloud data protection keeps the Crick’s medical research Covid-secure

  Cloud data management services from Rubrik gave the Francis Crick Institute a data protection edge and have helped keep its vital work going through the pandemic

• October 14, 2020 14 Oct'20

  Fintech ‘unicorn’ Klarna probed over data misuse

  Online bank blames misuse of user data on human error as Information Commissioner’s Office weighs in

• October 07, 2020 07 Oct'20

  Department for Education failed to protect data on millions of children, says ICO

  The Department for Education’s National Pupil Database, which contains millions of items of data on the UK’s schoolchildren, was found to be non-compliant with data protection regulations across the board

• October 07, 2020 07 Oct'20

  ICO wraps up Cambridge Analytica investigation

  Information Commissioner’s Office concludes its investigation into Cambridge Analytica, saying no additional evidence has come to light that would change its previous assessments

• September 24, 2020 24 Sep'20

  Government blasted over ‘reckless’ contact-tracing security

  The Open Rights Group and Big Brother Watch accuse the government of endangering public health with a reckless attitude to contact-tracing data security