EN‘From 23-29 October 2015, Amsterdam will be the place to be for privacy and data protection specialists from across the globe, as three renowned international privacy conferences are held in Amsterdam that week. The Amsterdam Privacy Conference 2015 will last from 23-26 October; and from 26-29 October, the 37th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners Conference will take place.’
A change in EU regulations
The EU wants to implement new laws to drastically change the protection of its citizens’ data. The current European legislation dates back to 1995, this was even before the online era emerged. However, currently there are about 250 million Europeans using the Internet on a daily basis. It is important that the new regulations regarding the process of storing personal details are created in the current time where innovative ways of storing data are emerging every day. We have summarized the most important changes for you below
Most important changes as a result of the new regulations:
• The new regulations do not only concern companies within Europe but even companies from other continents that target European citizens as their customers; in particular large enterprises with users and employees all over the world.
• The EU plans on introducing new documentation regulations, which force organisations to save all their documents regarding the management of data.
• According to the new regulations, every company will have to compose a privacy policy that clearly states which personal data will be processed and for what purpose.
• The proposed regulations contain a ‘right to erase’: when a citizen requests to be erased from a certain company’s database, that company has to comply with the request.
• The Commission proposes that a company should only be able to process personal information after obtaining permission from the person in question; this permission can also be revoked at any time.
• In the context of the new regulations, supervisors will have the authority to enforce fines if a regulation is violated. These fines can be imposed as of the 1st of January 2016.
• Another major aspect is that if foreign authorities ask for information regarding European citizens, an authorization from a European judge is needed!
Who is against this law?
Companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo have lobbied heavily against this law. They are worried that their operational activities regarding data collection will become more complicated and expensive. Currently, the management of these companies does not comply with the new privacy regulations. The US government is also against this new legislation, as it increases the threshold of monitoring for the purpose of terrorism control.
Privacy consequences
Without any elaborate impact analysis, it seems apparent that this law, which will be implemented in the EU and have global effects as of the end of 2015, will result in consequences for common data management and the set-up of organizations around such. It goes without saying that this will have considerable effects on the data management within companies around the globe, as a lot of businesses already struggle to control the way that employees manage company data like e-mail, social media and files.
Would you like to ensure that your business data complies with the new regulations?
Are you worried about the safety of your business data, would like to make use a safe e-mail platform or rent a dedicated server? vBoxx is a completely Dutch hosting company that guarantees data storage in the Netherlands and will fully comply with these new regulations. Feel free to contact us or read more about our total privacy.