About this time last January, the European Parliament released its proposal for a new ePrivacy Regulation. The intent of the ePrivacy Regulation is to replace the current ePrivacy regime – which consists of an ePrivacy Directive and a patchwork of local implementing legislation – with a uniform set of directly-applicable EU-wide rules. Since the Parliament […]
Legislation
Data Protection Litigation to Become a New Reality in Belgium
On November 16, 2017 the Belgian Senate adopted an “Act on the Establishment of the Data Protection Authority” (the “Act”). Following Austria, Germany, and the UK, Belgium is the fourth EU Member State to pass a domestic statute implementing the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“GDPR”) prior to its effective date of 25 May 2018. […]
Bill Proposes Jail Time for Executives Who Conceal Data Breaches
On November 30, 2017, a group of U.S. senators re-introduced a bill, known as the Data Security and Breach Notification Act, which seeks to impose criminal liability of up to five years of jail time on any corporate executive convicted of “intentionally and willfully” concealing a data breach. The bill also proposes that the Federal […]
Challenge to Privacy Shield Dismissed by EU General Court
In October of last year, we reported that digital rights advocacy group Digital Rights Ireland (“DRI”) had brought an action to annul the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. DRI filed its challenge before the General Court of the European Union, which is the court of first instance in the EU system with exclusive jurisdiction over challenges to […]
An English-Language Primer on Germany’s GDPR Implementation Statute: Part 5 of 5
Over the past year, the German government has been working on legislation to implement the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). On July 6, 2017, Germany did so by passing a statute titled the Data Protection Amendments and Implementation Act. The Act repeals Germany’s venerated Federal Data Protection Act (Bundesdatenschutzgesetz, or BDSG) and replaces it […]