5 Privacy

April 1, 2015 (SCMP) — Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner Allan Chiang has released new guidelines on the use of drones. Users are urged to avoid flying them too close to other people or their homes, and to post notices at locations and announcements on social media before using drones. The guidelines call for flashing lights to be fitted to drones to indicate if they are recording and that irrelevant recordings should be erased....

Oct. 9, 2014 — The PRC Supreme People’s Court has issued a new judicial interpretation of regulations to provide standardized rules for the handling of trials involving online torts, including defamation and privacy. Xinhua story here Commentary here English and Chinese text of Supreme People’s Court Regulations Concerning Some Questions of Applicable Law in Handling Civil Dispute Cases involving the Use of...

Hong Kong’s privacy commissioner Allan Chiang has urged Google to extend the “right to be forgotten” to Hong Kong and elsewhere beyond the European Union. In a controversial ruling in May 2014, the European Court of Justice held that individuals in the EU had a right to ask search companies to remove links to information about them that is “inadequate, irrelevant, no longer relevant or excessive.”...

16 June 2014 — The Hong Kong government told the Legislative Council’s Panel on Constitutional Affairs that there are “no favourable conditions” to take a proposed new law on stalking further, after failing to foster a consensus among stakeholders. An anti-stalking law was first proposed in 2000 by the Law Reform Commission, but it failed to gain public support, with concerns being raised about its potential...

The Administrative Appeals Board has upheld rulings by the Privacy Commissioner of Hong Kong against two magazines for publishing covert photographs of several celebrities from inside their homes, and affirmed the commissioner’s rejection of the magazine’s public-interest claims.