Painfully Outdated

The Privacy Protection Authority published draft guidelines on the use of drones in public spaces. Sometimes I wonder about the topics the Authority chooses to review in its guidelines, because from my experience they are not the most pressing issues. But I do know the authority is always well-intentioned and its fine people work their best to make do ...

Dramatic Overhaul of Israeli Data Security Regulations

Last week, the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) promulgated the Protection of Privacy Regulations (Data Security), 5777-2017 (the “Regulations”). This marks the consummation of a legislative process that began in 2010 with the Israeli Law, Information and Technology Authority (ILITA, the Israeli privacy regulator), when the first draft of the Regulations was published for public comment.

The Regulations introduce a far ...

Lessons from the Israeli Electronic Signature Law


10 years after the enactment of the Israeli Electronic Signature Law, electronic signatures are poorly adopted in Israeli e-commerce. The Law clearly failed to meet its expectations. Major projects include only two prominent ones by the government –
  • Reports made by public companies to the Israeli Securities Authority and the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange must be signed digitally. This required the ...

Challenges to AI Medical Research Under Privacy Laws

The Israeli Ministry of Health – backed up by government decision no. 3709 of March 25, 2018 – announced a national program to promote digital health. It is a highly ambitious plan, that relies heavily on using patients' health records as accumulated during the last 30 years in Israel and recorded in medical databases from various resources – clinical data, ...

The WordPress-Wix Dispute

The open source community is engaged in a heated dispute between Automatic (the company behind WordPress) and Wix, two of the most prominent developers of content management systems. Reading carefully through the posts of both companies, it seems that they may strike on a fundamental dispute within the Free Software community and legal professionals counseling on Open Source Software: just ...

Can I Attack the Attacker?


Your organization has been cyber-attacked. Sensitive business and customer information has been leaked. Your organization’s reputation and competitive edge suffers irreparable damage. You hire a cyber security firm to investigate. The firm traces the hackers’ tracks and is about to hack into their computer systems in order to mitigate the damage, uncover more information about the hackers’ methods, disable their ...

An Orwellian Nightmare? The Proposed Cyber Law

Imagine that at any given moment, the State can enter your business, demand any document and information you have, instruct you on how to operate your IT system, seize computers,  communication systems and drives containing data, or even help itself to your workstations and operate them by itself. Imagine that your most guarded information – your bookkeeping system, Excel files ...

One Law for the State – Another for Startups


The well-known French saying “noblesse oblige” indicates that nobility obliges. Israel loves to be a “start-up nation”. It is therefore expectable that the Israeli domestic law be in line with a state that boasts its encouragement of business creativity and innovation. But it is not. When it comes to technology, the substantive law in Israel is often outdated. Even worse, ...