On 21 November, in Rugby Football Union v Viagogo Ltd [2012] UKSC 55, the UK Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeals’ order for the disclosure of the identities of individuals who had used an online ticketing website to sell and purchase international rugby tickets at inflated prices in breach of the Rugby Football

This post was written by Nick Tyler.

Last month we highlighted a resolution of the American Bar Association urging U.S. courts to: “consider and respect…the data protection and privacy laws of any…foreign sovereign, and the interests of any person who is subject to, or benefits from, such laws”, in the context of the onerous legal

This post was written by Nick Tyler.

In a case involving the “extraordinary rendition and related issues” of individuals detained or captured by UK soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Upper Tribunal (Administrative Appeals Chamber) has taken what many will view as a practical and realistic approach to when personal data can be anonymised effectively and thereby fall outside the scope of the UK Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA), so enabling disclosure without constraint.

The Tribunal dismissed the concerns of both the data controller, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the UK’s data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner, about the extent to which the information requested could be appropriately redacted to ensure anonymisation while the MoD continued to hold the original source personal data, including identifying information.

The long-held view among European data protection regulators has been that anonymisation cannot be achieved unless the key to identification – almost always held by a data controller – is permanently destroyed. This ruling challenges that prevailing view.

The Tribunal took the view that careful redaction of the key information that would enable identification of any individual, can mean that data is not personal data and so falls outside the scope of the DPA.Continue Reading Plain Vanilla or Rocky Road? – UK Tribunal ruling on release of anonymised data sure to court controversy