The Australian Attorney-General has requested the Australian Law Reform Commission to inquire into protection of privacy in the digital era.

One of the matters for review, specified by the Terms of Reference, is “the detailed legal design of a statutory cause of action for serious invasions of privacy”.

An earlier review by the ALRC in 2008, and responses to the Government’s 2011 discussion paper, showed little consensus on how a legal right to sue for breach of privacy should be created, or whether it should be created at all.

Church leaders, gun ownership advocates and other rights activists have filed a lawsuit against the US National Security Agency, claiming its surveillance programme is unconstitutional, reports IP Watch.

At the start of 2012 the EU proposed a right for individuals ‘to be forgotten’ – that is, to be able to request that those holding their personal data remove the digital copies of the information.

But, given that the data an individual may wish to have ‘forgotten’ is likely to stored (mirrored, etc) in numerous locations, is it practical? Sheppherd & Wedderburn discuss this question, and conclude that it may not be.

The Fourth Circuit recently held that email communications between spouses sent through an employer’s email system could not be considered “confidential” and, therefore, were not protected by the marital privilege.

The court rejected the defendant’s argument that emails to his wife sent from his work account were protected by the marital privilege, on the ground that he had no reasonable expectation that they would remain confidential, reports Arnold & Porter.

The defendant’s employer had implemented a computer policy in 2008 that required its employees to acknowledge (by pressing a key to log onto their computers) that they would have no expectation of privacy in using its computer system. Although the messages at issue were sent in 2006, the Fourth Circuit found that the defendant did not take any steps to protect the emails in question once the employer’s policy was implemented and, thus, waived the marital privilege.

WhatsApp Inc, the California-based mobile app developer with upwards of 400 million users, was subject to a joint investigation by Dutch and Canadian Privacy Authorities for violations of their national privacy and data protection laws, reports Bird & Bird.

On the basis of the results of their investigation, the two data protection authorities concluded that WhatsApp was violating ‘certain internationally accepted privacy principles’, particularly in relation to the retention and disclosure of the users’ personal data.

Only iPhone users running iOS 6 on their devices have the option of adding contacts manually rather than uploading the mobile address numbers of their address books to company servers automatically. The authorities deem this not acceptable, as they hold that both users and non-users should have control over their personal data: users must be able to freely decide what contact details they wish to share with WhatsApp.

The Court of Appeal for Ontario has determined that an Internet user who accesses child pornography does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy so as to preclude an ISP from disclosing the user’s identity to police, reports McCarthy Tétrault.