The use of an assessment methodology to personal understand privacy risks and rights has been known since the mid-1990s [1]. The growing interest in what were then called Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA) was triggered by the exponential growth of data storage and analysis plus the public reaction to the inevitable leaks and scandals. Today DPIAs […]
Website owners targeting EU and EEA EFTA residents must take steps to protect themselves following yet another court ruling. Websites that drop third-party cookies and other trackers without proper end-user consent, will find themselves in legal jeopardy as they are now deemed responsible for personal data collected using cookies that is shared with other organisations. Since […]
As we have written about elsewhere on this site, Convention 108 was the first enforceable Data Protection transnational legislation globally. As the Council of Europe (CoE) describes it “This Convention is the first binding international instrument which protects the individual against abuses which may accompany the collection and processing of personal data and which seeks […]
Much has been written about the Brussels effect and how the EU is a regulatory superpower. This article is about a different aspect of European Data Protection law and geography: it is about in which countries European’s personal data can lawfully be processed by default. Introduction Once data has been collected in our globalised world, […]
International data transfers from the EU EU data protection law has evolved to provides common standards for data protection across Member States. With that evolution the EU now expect “adequacy” of data protection laws from third countries which are outside the EEA. This expectation was codified in the Data Protection Directive (1995) which prohibited the […]
Without doubt Europe is driving the emergence of Data Protection laws across the globe. This tends to be framed as a result of the introduction of GDPR. However as we have noted previously because of the two supranational legal orders in Europe, today there are two subtlety different laws governing data protection as well as data […]
The mess of acronyms which denote various European organisations can be overwhelming. None more so that the legal orders and courts involved in European Data Protection. In this article we explain the origins and purposes of the two main courts CJEU and ECtHR. The big European institutions We discuss the two major European institutions: the […]
Many people seem that believe that a personal data can be anonymised by just writing over the identifier with asterixis. This is incorrect and exposes both the business or institution as well as the data subjects to major privacy risks. Useful Definitions Firstly it is worth considering two terms pseudonymisation & anonymisation again. The difference […]
The law across Europe now says a DPIA is required when the processing is “likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons” (GDPR Article 35(1)). Where the key term is “high risk”. To be clear not all processing requires a DPIA. A DPIA is mandatory for that subset of processing activities which meet the threshold of high risk. Since GDPR […]
Many of our clients with CCTV cameras receive requests from An Garda Siochaná, the PSNI or some other Statutory Authority (SAs as they are commonly referred to) for CCTV footage. The familiar problem here is the client is trapped between the rights of the individual(s) on the footage on one side and rights of the […]