Publications of Irion, K.

Your Digital Home is No Longer Your Castle: How Cloud Computing Transforms the (Legal) Relationship between Individuals and Their Personal Records

In line with the overall trend individuals’ personal affairs, too, are composed of digital records to an increasing amount. At about the same time, the era of local storage in end-user equipment is about to give way to remote computing where data resides on third party equipment (cloud computing). Once information, and even the most personal one, is no longer stored on personal equipment the relationship between individual users and their digital assets belonging to them is becoming increasingly abstract. This contribution focuses on the implications of cloud computing for individuals’ unpublicized digital records. The question to be answered is whether—taken together—the progressing virtualization and the disruption of physical control produce a backslide for individual positions of rights. The article introduces the legal treatment of users’ digital personal records and how a technical transformation in combination with disparate legal protection and prevailing commercial practices are bound to impact the distribution of rights and obligations.

The Court of Justice and the Data Retention Directive in Digital Rights Ireland – Telling Off the EU Legislator and Teaching a Lesson in Privacy and Data Protection

In Digital Rights Ireland, the Court of Justice invalidated the 2006 Data Retention Directive, which required private providers to retain for a considerable period electronic communication metadata for law enforcement purposes.In this landmark ruling, the EU judiciary introduced a strict scrutiny test for EU legislative acts that interfere seriously with important rights protected by the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights—in this case, the rights to privacy and data protection—and applied a rigorous assessment of the proportionality of the measure under the Charter, criticising numerous aspects of the Directive.This article presents and analyses the judgment, discussing its implications for constitutional review and constitutionalism in the European Union, and the substantive and procedural constraints that it imposes on EU and national data retention schemes.It concludes by reflecting on the ruling’s impact on European integration and data related policies.

Online Personal Data Processing and the EU Data Protection Reform

The report sheds light on the fundamental questions and underlying tensions between current policy objectives, compliance strategies and global trends in online personal data processing, assessing the existing and future framework in terms of effective regulation and public policy. Based on the discussions among the members of the CEPS Digital Forum and independent research carried out by the rapporteurs, policy conclusions are derived with the aim of making EU data protection policy more fit for purpose in today’s online technological context. This report constructively engages with the EU data protection framework, but does not provide a textual analysis of the EU data protection reform proposal as such.

Government Cloud Computing and National Data Sovereignty

Government cloud services are a new development at the intersection of electronic government and cloud computing which holds the promise of rendering government service delivery more effective and efficient. Cloud services are virtual, dynamic, and potentially stateless which has triggered governments' concern for data sovereignty. This article explores data sovereignty in relation to government cloud services and how national strategies and international policy evolve. It concludes that data sovereignty presents national governments with a legal risk that cannot be adequately addressed with technology or through contractual arrangements alone. Governments therefore adopt strategies that aim to retain sovereignty over government information.