(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/4LPBEm)
(The author would like to thank Swaraj Paul Barooah for his valuable insights.)
A student-run group at NALSAR University of Law
(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/4LPBEm)
(The author would like to thank Swaraj Paul Barooah for his valuable insights.)
(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/9RovZB)
This is the first in a two-part post on the Right to be Forgotten. This post is part of our 101 series of posts, which seek to explain the issue at hand, and the next post shall address the issue and the debate surrounding it in more detail.In 2010, a Spanish citizen filed a complaint against a Spanish newspaper, Google Spain and Google Inc. with the national Data Protection Agency. The complaint objected to an auctioned notice of his repossessed home that kept coming up on Google’s search results. The proceedings against the petitioner had been fully resolved and he claimed the reference to the proceedings on Google to be entirely redundant and a violation of his privacy rights. The Spanish court referred the case to the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The following are some of the interesting articles that our editors have found this week on the Internet.
1. The Solace of Oblivion, Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker.
The Law Commission of India is currently hosting a two day consultation process on issues concerning media law. This comes in the backdrop of the TRAI’s Recommendations on Ownership of Media released on August 12, 2014. The first panel looked at the much debated topic of Self Regulation v. Structural Regulation. The consultation was attended by journalists, academics and students. Ironically, the notable absence in the entire consultation process were the ‘owners’ who would be most effected from the outcome of any future binding regulation.
This panel consisted of Justice R.V. Raveendran, N. Ram, Ravish Kumar and Vanita Kohli-Khandekar. The panel was moderated by S. Varadrajan.
(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/mjhubJ)
Recently in our class on the Law of Evidence, the discussion turned to the security of email accounts, specifically Gmail. Our teacher asked a general question, about how easy it would be for a person to hack a Gmail account, on a scale of 0 (extremely difficult) to 5(extremely easy). There was a smattering of response, ranging between 0 to 1.5.
(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/e9LG7B)
(This post is based in part on a paper earlier published by Rostrum Law Review)
(Image Source: https://flic.kr/p/e9LG7B)
(This post is based in part on a paper published by Rostrum Law Review)
(Image Source: opensource.com, https://flic.kr/p/84VZAr)
The following post by Samyak Sibasish is the first in a series of posts analysing the effects of Social Media, specifically Facebook, on Privacy. This post focuses on the constitutional and tortuous dimensions of the issue, while the next one will focus on the contractual aspects of it. Samyak is a 3rd year student at NUJS, Kolkata. Apart from being interested in cricket and politics, he spends his time on reading on law and justice systems, more specifically caste. Additionally, being a social media freak, he likes to research on the curious myriad ways the world of social media interacts with the laws that govern it.Of late, it has been confirmed by media that Facebook has seen a meteoric rise in its number of users over the past decade and if bracketed as a nation, it can be the fourth most populated nation in the world. It is but pertinent to examine how protected is users’ privacy on a social networking forum like Facebook.
In Foreign Lands: US and the EU
Earlier, I’ve given a broad picture of the data retention scenario in India. Now, I attempt to draw a comparison between India and other, more “advanced” jurisdictions such as the US and the EU.
Descriptively, data retention refers to the gathering and storing of information relating to subscribers’ use of telecommunications networks. This storage happens at a remote location, inaccessible to the user whose activities are the origin of the stored data. Typically, data retention protocols require the continuous collection of certain parameters from internet users and the maintenance of comprehensive records of user activity, in one form or another. Retention can be done at the ISP level, as a commercial decision on the part of the service provider, or at the regulatory level, as a national policy decision on the part of the State in order to achieve larger goals of law enforcement and public order. Over the course of two posts, I will attempt to construct a brief critique of the policies adopted, first narrating the Indian stance and then using contemporary global trends as a yardstick against which this stance can be measured.