Policy Observatory

The French data protection authority (CNIL) released - on 19 May 2014 - its 2013 Annual Report, detailing its activities for the past year. Additionally, the CNIL published its 2014 strategy on 29 April 2014, outlining the key focus areas in the year ahead. The CNIL stated that it aims to increase privacy audits from 414 in 2013 to 550 in 2014 - an increase of 33%.

Since February 2015, CNIL has a person in charge of reviewing the websites which are blocked on grounds of online propaganda, terrorism or child pornography content.

In 2015, CNIL plans to pursue 550 controls on new technologies or newly established procedures which are part of the daily life of French citizens. For comparison, in 2014 a total of 421 checks were made. The top priority areas include the treatment of personal data in the framework of managing psycho-social risks in companies, Binding Corporate Rules, the national database for driving licenses set up by the Ministry of Interior and others.

The government legislative proposal to create a national database of persons who committed terrorism crimes, foreseeing similar procedural treatment as the existing databases on sexual or violent offenders (database currently examined by the Constitutional Council and the European Court of Human Rights). CNIL opinion covered such aspects as the length of data storage, automatic inscription of certain persons and the recipient of data.

The detailed CNIL consultation input is available here.

CNIL alerted that the surveillance files have the legal specificity of prohibiting any control from the perspective of compliance with the law on Internet freedom.

CNIL received hundreds of complaints following Google’s refusals to carry out delisting on Internet links (or URL).

Following the assessment of the complaints, the CNIL has requested Google to carry out the delisting of several results. It was expressly requested that the delisting should be effective on whole search engine, irrespective of the extension used (.fr; .uk; .com …).

Although the company has granted some of the requests, delisting was only carried out on European extensions of the search engine and not when searches are made from “google.com” or other non-European extensions. In this context, the President of the CNIL has put Google on notice to proceed, within a period of fifteen (15) days, to the requested delisting on the whole data processing and thus on all extensions of the search engine.