Policy Observatory

The Irish High Court refers Facebook privacy case to the Court of Justice of the European Unionin order to determine the legal status of data transfers under Standard Contractual Clauses. Therefore, Facebook could face questions from the CJEU about the validity of the model clauses it uses to transfer data outside of the 28-member-state bloc.

The German government is maintaining its unswerving commitment to make communications data retention obligatory from July 2017 onwards. Meanwhile, different EU level groups and institutions are discussing if or how data retention measures are compatible with EU law.

ICANN’s management is now thinking about how to comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). ICANN’s Whois policies require registries and registrars to provide indiscriminate public access to personal data about domain name registrants, and thus violate European privacy laws.

The European Data Protection Supervisor issued an opinion containing recommendations for the police and justice sectors. EDPS recalls that data protection in the police and justice sectors should be fully consistent with the general rules contained in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and should only contain specifications and adjustments where necessary in view of the specific nature of these sectors. The scope of the Directive should be limited to the areas where specific rules are really necessary, namely the activities of criminal law enforcement by police and judicial authorities, as was the  case  in  the  original  proposal  of  the Commission. Moreover, the performance of law enforcement tasks by non-public entities and organisations should be subject to the GDRP.

Links to the press release and opinion.

The European Commission has fined Google €2.42 billion for breaching EU antitrust rules. Google has abused its market dominance as a search engine by giving an illegal advantage to another Google product, its comparison shopping service.

The governments of France, Spain and Portugal want to double down on a law proposed by the European Commission that would force all kinds of internet platforms to install a “censorship machine” to surveil all uploads and try to prevent copyright infringement.