Access to data / Consumer law / content data / content regulation / Data protection / Personal data

Data Protection Concerns raised by Proposed EU Directive on Contracts for Supply of Digital Content

It may not be ‘all about the money’, but there is some ‘price tag’ often associated with what we do online…. And that’s our data! Updates on the incoming GDPR and the potential implications of the new E-Privacy Regulation dominate EU privacy and data protection discourse currently. Yet, there is another further (and potentially overlapping) … Continue reading

Access to data / Data protection / General Data Protection Regulation / Law enforcement / Legitimate interest / Personal data / sensitive data

CJEU Advocate General Opines on the ‘Legitimate Interest’ Concept

But how exactly does EU law achieve the weighing of competing legitimate interests and rights in a data protection law context? I’ve previously written (here) about the concept of legitimate interest under data protection law and how it has captured the attention of data protection agencies, as well as the EU institutions in informing the … Continue reading

Access to data / anonymisation / Data protection / Data transfer / de-identification / General Data Protection Regulation / pseudonymisation / Risk-based approach

A call for a common techno-legal language to speak about anonymisation, pseudonymisation, de-identification… Could this be one of the biggest challenges brought about by the GDPR?

  The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be applicable in less than two years and lawyers as well as others are trying to grapple with definitional issues. The graduated approach that would have meant alleviating the regime of certain categories of data such as pseudonymised data (e.g. by eliminating the need to comply with … Continue reading

Access to data / Breach notification / Data protection / Data retention / General Data Protection Regulation / Law enforcement / Personal data / Privacy / Privacy impact assessment / Surveillance

Article 29 WP and the draft directive on the processing of personal data by law enforcement agencies: has Article 29 WP been heard?

Last month, the Permanent Representatives Committee (Coreper) of the Council of the EU  the compromise texts agreed with the European Parliament on data protection reform. As a reminder, the reform is a legislative package concerning two legislative instruments: the second of which discussed here (and far less catching the press headlines than the General Data … Continue reading

Access to data / Internet intermediaries / Surveillance / terrorism

What if the French constitutional judges had read the Davis Judgement? Would we be living in a better world?

The French Constitutional Court (Conseil Constitutionnel) issued its decision n°2015-713 DC on the recently adopted Law on intelligence on 23 July 2015. Reading its decision after having read the Davis judgment of the English High Court, one wonders whether legal syllogism has suddenly been replaced by useless tautology. The newly adopted law on intelligence is … Continue reading

Access to data / Data retention / Internet intermediaries / Law enforcement

The (EU Parliament) Legal Service’s opinion on the impact of the invalidity of the data retention Directive…. Is the wind starting to blow?

On 8 January, the legal service of the European Parliament released an opinion, the purpose of which was to answer 9 questions posed by its LIBE Committee (Civil Liberties, Justice and Home affairs), as regards the effect of the judgment of CJEU in the landmark Digital Ireland (DRI) case of 8 April 2014 on the … Continue reading