Scholarly Articles & Institutional Publications

On February 29, 2016, the European Commission issued the legal texts to implement the EU-US Privacy Shield and a communication relevant to that. The Commission also released a draft “adequacy decision”. Once adopted, the adequacy decision establishes that “the safeguards provided when data are transferred under the new EU-U.S. Privacy Shield are equivalent to data protection standards […]

Francesca Giannoni-Crystal & Allyson Haynes Stuart have just published in the Information law Journal an article dealing with privacy and data protection in the IoT. The article deals with recent developments in the IoT sector, highlights the difficulty of giving a definition of the IoT, and discuss the most important authorities (on the two side of the Atlantic) […]

On January 22, 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) released draft guidance entitled “Postmarket Management of Cybersecurity in Medical Devices”. The document outlines recommendations to medical device manufacturers for managing postmarket cybersecurity vulnerabilities for marketed medical devices. The draft guidance applies to: 1) medical devices that contain software (including firmware) or programmable logic, […]

On February 9, 2016, President Obama President issued an executive order establishing the “Federal Privacy Council”, an interagency support structure consisting of senior privacy officials from each cabinet agency. The Privacy Council was established – according to the President – to protect privacy in order to maintain trust in the public institutions, considering the large amounts of […]

On January 25, 2016, the US government responded to EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) ’s FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request and released in full the European Union-United States data protection “Umbrella Agreement”. The European Commission had already made the file publicly available on its website (see here) starting on September 2015. The US Government highlighted […]

  On October 29, 2015, the European Parliament approved a resolution on the safe use of remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) in the field of civil aviation. As flying drones for commercial services and recreational use becomes even more popular, the European Parliament calls for a legal European framework ensuring that they pose no threat […]

After the EU Court of Justice (ECJ) held that the Safe Harbour decision is invalid (see here ), all transfers of personal data that are still taking place under the decision are unlawful. So the Article 29 Working Party (WP29) in its September 16, 2015 statement after the ECJ’s Schrems decision. The Woking group also opines that […]

Dutch courts seem conscious of the need to balance privacy with the right to freedom of expression. Two authors, Kulk and Zuiderveen Borgesius, published on August 27, 2015, a paper, Freedom of Expression and ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ Cases in the Netherlands after Google Spain, examining how the Google Spain judgment has been applied in […]

On September 11, 2015, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) issued an opinion “to provide a framework for a wider and deeper discussion on how the EU can ensure the integrity of its values at the same time as it embraces the benefits of the new technologies”. Opinion 4/2015, “Towards a new digital ethics, Data, […]

France Article 32-II of the French Data Protection Act transposes into French law the obligation to obtain informed consent to store information of Article 5.3, Directive 2002/58/EC (above). On December 16, 2013, the CNIL, the French Data Protection Authority, released a set of practical FAQs (plus technical tools and relevant source code, in French) providing […]