EU Data Protection Regulation

With the EU Data Protection “reform train” rounding what is hopefully the final bend towards the summit of consensus, the UK ICO have published their latest analysis on the Council’s draft EU Data Protection Regulation. The analysis demonstrates the improvement needed in order to ensure that the new law provides effective protection to individuals while being “easy to understand and working well in practice.”  To recap: all three key EU institutions – Commission, Parliament and Council – have prepared alternative drafts and are ready to negotiate in trilogue, with the timetable aiming to complete the process by the end of 2015.

The journey began in January 2012 when the European Commission issued its draft of the General Data Protection Regulation (the “DP Reg”) – the first step in meaningful revision of this area in nearly 20 years. The European Parliament approved its version of the DP Reg in March 2014 and the Council agreed upon its own version on 15 June 2015.
Continue Reading EU Data Protection Reforms: ICO Critiques Council Draft Regulation Over Consent, Access Rights, EU v. Member State Balance of Power

This post was written by Cynthia O’Donoghue.

The UK Justice Committee has laid out its concerns in its opinion on the European Commission’s legislative proposals (the Proposal) for reform of the European Data Protection Framework. In forming its judgement, the Justice Committee heard evidence from: the Ministry of Justice, the Information Commissioner’s Office

The EU’s proposed EU Data Protection Framework encourages the use of privacy seals, certification mechanisms and trust marks. Any organisation which has obtained a privacy seal would be considered to have attained a ‘stamp of approval’, indicating good privacy standards.

Anticipating the development of data protection kite marks, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has launched

This post was written by Cynthia O’Donoghue.

In the Article 29 Working Party’s Opinion on the new EU data protection reforms, the Working Party has carefully studied both the Regulation and the Directive, and has given its first general reaction. The Working Party welcomed the provisions intended to clarify and strengthen the rights of

The ICO has published its initial analysis of the European Commission’s reform of the EU Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC (“the Directive”). The ICO published its review of the draft Data Protection Regulation and the Directive on data protection in law enforcement (“DP Framework”) on 25 January 2012, but was quick to stress that its review

Not only did the U.S. Department of Commerce submit an informal paper (as discussed in a previous post on this blog), but it has come to light that intense lobbying from the United States has influenced a “watering down” of the draft EU Data Protection Regulation.

Even within the EU, certain provisions of the