privacy/personal data protection - legal aspects of new technologies

The battle with the coronavirus is dynamically entering another phase.
After the initial shock, we are realising that technology may have a crucial
impact on the rate of return to a somewhat more normal life. This doesn’t mean
just biotech. Solutions keeping the virus under relative control until effective
vaccines reach the market can prove just as important.

With this article, we would like to launch a series of publications on the legal aspects of solutions for supporting the battle with the coronavirus. These solutions are extremely interesting from the conceptual and technological perspective, but also entail numerous legal issues.

An anti-obscenity association issued a proposal for an Act on Protection of Minors against Pornographic Content on 16 December 2019. It has gained the official support of the Family Council, which recommended to the Prime Minister that the proposal be adopted for further legislative work. The Minister of Family, Labour and Social Policy announced that work on the bill should conclude in the first half of 2020. The need to restrict children’s access to pornography is obvious, but the proposal has generated much controversy, mainly due to the proposed mechanism for age verification, which may invade internet users’ privacy. The proposal would also impose additional obligations on telecommunications operators, electronic service providers, and payment service providers.

The Court of Justice of the European Union has once again spoken about the limits of the right to be forgotten. This time, it answered requests for a preliminary ruling in the case of Google v CNIL (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés, the French public authority responsible for regulating personal data processing). The case concerned a fine of EUR 100,000 which the CNIL imposed on Google after it refused to remove, in the exercise of a data subject’s right to be forgotten, links from all language versions of its search engine.

Recently, the Swedish supervisory authority responsible for compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation imposed a fine of approximatively EUR 20,000 for the use of technology to monitor students’ attendance. Importantly, the processing of personal data in the form of images of students was not carried out on a permanent basis, but was a short-term test to assess the usefulness of such a solution in the schools’ activity.

We wrote several months ago about the imposition of fines by the French data protection authority CNIL (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés) for data protection breaches. Recently CNIL has imposed more fines, including for violation of standards for secure processing of personal data on a website.

The case involved an auto insurance broker. On the broker’s website, users could request a calculation of insurance premiums, conclude an insurance contract, and log on to their account, where various types of personal data were accessible, such as bank statements and information about driving-licence suspensions or convictions for traffic violations.

After a proceeding lasting two years, the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) issued a decision on 30 May 2019 in the case of the Polish telecom Netia concerning the method of collecting marketing consents, and the wording of the consents, obtained for Netia by its business partners. UOKiK found that a substantial showing was made that Netia’s practice of making telephone calls to consumers who were not Netia subscribers, and had not given prior consent to contacts by telephone, violated the collective interests of consumers.