Please join us for a new Webinar series hosted by MLex Data Privacy & Security experts. The series includes three webinars, covering various implications of the pandemic on data privacy and protection regulation across the globe. New concerns from emerging technology such as contact tracing and location monitoring apps, recent enforcement trends and pressure for new regulation are among the topics to be discussed.
June 17
10.00:11.00 CEST (9.00-10.00 BST)
Covid-19 has raised privacy questions around the world but nowhere more so than the EU, which has the world’s strictest data-protection regime. Regulators are scrambling to invoke exemptions to the General Data Protection Regulation, while governments are desperate to roll out new contact-tracing apps, among other measures, to support the lifting of their lockdowns. But those apps also show why they can’t ignore privacy concerns, as they will need buy-in from a majority of citizens if they are to be effective.
Asia was the first region in the world to experience the outbreak of Covid-19, which happened at a time when many countries in the region were already working on substantial revisions to laws dealing with technology-related data-privacy concerns. The crisis put into stark relief the trade-offs between the risks to privacy and the risks to public health of using, or not using, technology in such public-health emergencies. The reactions of governments and the public to the use of technologies such as contact-tracing applications have been varied. South Korea and Australia provide case studies highlighting the challenges regulators face, especially as privacy issues have emerged in recent years as the subject of major policy developments in the US and Europe.
Data privacy issues are being amplified in the US—a country where coronavirus has hit the hardest and there is now a glaring gap of federal data privacy and protection laws. The California Consumer Protection Act, or CCPA, went into effect January 1 and is set to start being enforced this summer. However, COVID-19 could change the path of what many were expecting from this new law and potentially the future of data privacy laws across the country.