Category Archives: Defamation and Privacy
Defamation cases should routinely be commenced in the Circuit Court and not the High Court, and the forthcoming Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024 should be amended accordingly
It is widely reported this morning that the Government has approved the publication of the long-awaited, much-delayed, and eagerly-anticipated Defamation (Amendment) Bill 2024 … It will deal with issues such as the abolition of juries, the control of strategic litigation against publish participation (SLAPPs), live broadcasts, transient retail defamation, support for alternative resolution of defamation […]
‘Journalism vs data privacy: The GDPR dilemma in reporting crimes’
When reporting crimes, news portals (hereinafter often referred to as controllers who determine the means and purposes of processing personal data) frequently publish personal data (any information that directly or indirectly identifies an individual, as defined in Article 4(1), Regulation 2016/679). For instance, during the Madeleine McCann case, news agencies published unproven allegations against the […]
Nathalie Smuha, ‘The Paramountcy of Data Protection Law in the Age of AI (Acts)’
ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence’s data-driven nature renders it undeniably impactful on the rights to privacy and data protection. It is therefore no surprise that Europe’s upcoming AI Act is entwined with regulation that seeks to protect those rights, amongst other EU values. In this article, I dive deeper into the relationship between the AI Act and […]
Roberts and Richardson, ‘Privacy, Punishment and Private Law’
ABSTRACT While private law has developed various causes of action for breach of privacy, the criminal law has seldom used the concept of privacy in defining its proscriptions. There is no recognised category of ‘privacy crimes’. But new technologies are posing ever more serious threats to our privacy. On the one hand, this has led […]
‘Proximity, Amicable Settlements, and how the EU Guts GDPR Enforcement’
The European Union (EU) legislator is working on a new Regulation to modify the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The reform’s main aim is to strengthen the GDPR’s enforcement by further harmonising the procedures related to ‘cross-border’ personal data processing. One crucial element here is that this harmonisation will affect the handling in Ireland of […]
Vagelis Papakonstantinou, ‘Data Privacy Law as a New Field of Law’
ABSTRACT The turn of the 1980s was a milestone period in the development of data privacy laws, that was only paralleled by the turn of the 2020s. The former saw the introduction of Convention 108 by the Council of Europe in 1981 and, four months earlier, the OECD’s Guidelines ‘governing the Protection of Privacy and […]
Daniel Solove, ‘A Regulatory Roadmap to AI and Privacy’
ABSTRACT This short essay provides a regulatory roadmap to artificial intelligence and privacy. AI and privacy are deeply intertwined and have a complicated relationship with much overlap. AI can increase existing privacy problems, add dimensions and complexities to them, or remix them. Some attempts to regulate focus exclusively on AI, but doing this is like […]
Laje and Schmidt, ‘The Right to Data Portability as a Personal Right’
ABSTRACT The right to the portability of personal data guarantees the interested party the right to receive personal data that concern themselves. Specifically, data which a person has provided to a ‘data collector’ in a structured format can currently be transmitted to another ‘data collector’ without any legal consequences as long as the original ‘collector’ […]
Peter Kutner, ‘Truth in the Law of Defamation’
ABSTRACT This article identifies and examines important aspects of truth as a defence to defamation liability in common law and ‘mixed’ legal systems. These include the fundamental issue of what must be true to establish the defence, whether the defendant continues to have the burden of proving that a defamatory communication is true, the condition […]
Solove and Hartzog, ‘The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping and Privacy’
ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) systems depend on massive quantities of data, often gathered by ‘scraping’ – the automated extraction of large amounts of data from the internet. A great deal of scraped data is about people. This personal data provides the grist for AI tools such as facial recognition, deep fakes, and generative AI. Although […]