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Sloppy class action against Google Buzz dismissed

The Jerusalem District Court dismissed a 5 billion NIS (roughly $1.4 billion) class action against Google Israel Ltd. and Google Inc.
 
The class action was filed a year ago by a Gmail user, following Google's launch of the new Google Buzz social networking service. The action claimed that Google violated users' privacy, because Google automatically added Google Buzz to ...

Debt notifications cannot be sent by text messages

The ethics committee of the Israel Bar Association Tel-Aviv district, recently published general guidelines addressing the use of short messages services (SMS) and phone services when contacting a debtor. The ethics committee received many complaints regarding SMS's sent and phone messages left on the debtor's answering machines by lawyers, whilst trying to collect a debt. Adv. Efraim Naveh, chairman of ...

Israel: Monitoring employees email severely restricted

In a 91 pages opinion, the National Labor Court laid down a clear set of rules on employers right to monitor their employees email messages. The rules impose severe restrictions on that right and employers should consider reforming their workplace policies accordingly.

The issue that was brought before the court was whether an employer may access employees email messages and ...

BGA blocks access to political websites

Ben-Gurion Airport (Israel's international airport) may be all shiny and new, but if you try using the wireless internet connection to surf political organizations websites – right wing or left – you might be surprised to find that these have been blocked. The websites were found to be blocked by the airport's information security and filtering software - Fortinet - ...

Guidelines on patentability of software in Israel

The Israeli Patent Registrar ruled last week that a claimed invention restricted to a process executed by computer software, is not a patent-eligible subject matter. The ruling was announced in a policy statement issued by the Registrar Dr. Meir Noam. It puts an end to a lengthy public hearing during which a wide range of views were presented to the ...

EU confirms Israel's adequacy

The EU Commision published the much-anticipated announcement on the adequacy of data protection in Israel. Published on January 31st, the decision adopted by the commission determines that Israel provides and adequate level of protection for personal data transferred from the EU, however only in relation to automated international data transfers and to automated processing of data in Israel.

The decision ...

No general right to oblivion under Israeli law

In a first of its kind decision, the Tel-Aviv district court ruled that a subscriber of cellular services does not have a general right to have his phone records deleted.
 
Cellular providers maintain and store, as a general practice, a record of the calls made by their subscribers. The phone records include lists of phone numbers called, received calls, ...
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