Category Archives: Defamation and Privacy
Iain Field, ‘Uncommon And Unordinary: An Australian Perspective on the Fearn Decision’
ABSTRACT The decision of the United Kingdom Supreme Court in Fearn v Board of Trustees of The Tate Gallery is significant for various reasons. Of particular concern for some is the Court’s unanimous agreement that ‘intense visual intrusion into someone’s domestic property is capable of amounting to a [private] nuisance’. But the judgment is also […]
Paula Giliker, ‘Protecting Privacy through the Tort of Private Nuisance: Fearn v Tate Gallery in the UK Supreme Court’
ABSTRACT This article examines the UK Supreme Court’s decision in Tate Gallery from the perspective of privacy protection. It asks the question: why did the Supreme Court deal with the case as one of private nuisance when the Court of Appeal determined the real issue to be invasion of privacy? In tracing the case from […]
Max Helveston, ‘Reining in Commercial Exploitation of Consumer Data’
ABSTRACT The collection and use of consumer data by commercial entities has quickly transitioned from being an obscure topic to a headlining issue in leading media outlets. The burgeoning societal awareness of how digital devices are collecting and transmitting data about individuals has led to growing concerns about how this information is being used, stored, […]
Binns and Edwards, ‘Reputation Management in the ChatGPT Era’
ABSTRACT Generative AI systems often generate outputs about real people, even when not explicitly prompted to do so, leading to significant reputational and privacy harms, especially when sensitive, misleading, or false. This paper considers what legal tools currently exist to protect such individuals, with a particular focus on defamation and data protection law. We explore […]
‘Top 10 Defamation Cases of 2024: a selection’
Inforrm reported on a large number of defamation cases from around the world in 2024. Following a now established tradition, with our widely read posts on 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 defamation cases, we present our selection of legally and factually interesting cases from England, Australia, New Zealand and Canada from the […]
Ezra Lim, ‘Defamation by Hyperlinks – Back to Basics?’
ABSTRACT The speed at which hyperlinks enable information to be disseminated poses challenges to legal regulation. In particular, major concerns arise over whether adherence to the Traditional Publication Rule would result in widespread liability. This paper explores how various jurisdictions have opted to tackle the issue of defamation via hyperlinks and highlights a shift towards […]
Meg Jones, ‘The Character of Consent: The History of Cookies and The Future of Technology Policy’
ABSTRACT The rich, untold origin story of the ubiquitous web cookie – what’s wrong with it, why it’s being retired, and how we can do better. Consent pop-ups continually ask us to download cookies to our computers, but is this all-too-familiar form of privacy protection effective? No, Meg Leta Jones explains in The Character of […]
Gareth Davies, ‘Consent or Pay: Transforming Internet Users from Products into Customers’
ABSTRACT The recognition in Meta that consent-or-pay models for online services are in principle lawful has caused concern that data protection and privacy are now only available to those who pay, whereas they should be fundamental rights. There is considerable attachment among lawyers to the pre-Meta idea that whether not personal data is provided should […]
Kemp and Greenleaf, ‘Australia’s long-delayed privacy reform Bill – First instalment only?’
ABSTRACT At long last, Australia has a privacy reform Bill before Parliament, but it is a Bill that still omits most of the promised important reforms. In September 2023, three years after the process began to reform Australia’s Privacy Act 1988, the federal government responded to the 116 proposals made in the report by the […]
Stacy-Ann Elvy, ‘The Vehicle Monitoring and Collection Technology Era’
ABSTRACT Vehicle monitoring and collection (‘VMC’) technology, including starter interrupt devices that remotely disable vehicles, and other GPS tracking devices are used in consumer vehicle agreements in subprime transactions. Subscription-based models supported by VMC features, such as over-the-air software updates that remotely disable or enable vehicular functions, have also appeared in the non-subprime automobile context […]