CMA AI Report: The Foundation of the UK’s AI Response

CMA materials can be found here: Full report Summary Press release The UK Competition and Markets Authority has published an initial report on its investigation into AI Foundation Models (FMs), which addresses competitive concerns in the FM development phase and their downstream deployment. Upstream competitive concerns: The advent of AI technology promises to revolutionise every…

Navigating Health Data Compliance: A Roadmap for Employers

The ICO has released an extensive guide clarifying employers’ responsibilities regarding the processing of their employees’ health data. This guidance comes as a result of the ICO’s analysis of feedback received during a consultation on an earlier version of the document. Health data, considered a special category of personal data, enjoys heightened protection under the…

Transatlantic convergence? Recent cases on advertising and privacy from the USA and UK

The US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) suit against Kochava Inc, a prominent data aggregator and analytics company, faced a recent setback when the Idaho District Court granted Kochava’s motion to dismiss the FTC’s claim.[1] The FTC alleged that Kochava’s sale of geolocation data taken from mobile devices could enable third parties to uncover sensitive, personal…

Virgin succeeded in defending a claim by EE for loss of EE’s profits caused by Virgin’s breach of the MVNO Exclusivity Clause

A summary judgment against EE in its claim versus Virgin Mobile has significant implications for any companies bound by exclusivity provisions in English law governed contracts, which also contain exclusions of liability. In terms of the telecoms mobile sector, this could have major implications for MVNOs bound by exclusivity under any English governed MVNO agreement…

Getting out of a (data) scrape: global statement published for the protection of publicly accessible personal data online

On 24 August 2023, in conjunction with data protection authorities in eleven other countries, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) published a joint statement regarding data scraping and the protection of privacy. Data scraping refers to an automated means of extracting data from the web. While not in itself illegal, data protection authorities have reported…

The dark side of design: the ICO and CMA call for businesses to rethink their website layouts

The Information Commissioner’s Office (‘ICO’) and the Competition and Markets Authority (‘CMA’) have made clear in a recent report, Harmful design in digital markets, that online choice architecture (‘OCA’) must be designed in such a way that online users are not tricked or ‘nudged’ into giving away more personal data than they would have done…

UK’s World Leading Approach on Artificial Intelligence – White Paper outlines 5 guideline principles for responsible use of AI

The UK Government’s consultation on questions contained in its AI white paper for the implementation of a pro-innovation approach for AI regulation has now closed and further guidance on how to achieve the five principles (listed below) is expected. With these principles in place, the aim is for consumers to have more confidence to use…