Christopher Wolf on the Critical Time for the EU Data Protection Regulation

Christopher Wolf, who co-chairs the Future of Privacy Forum, wrote an article on the state of the art in data protection and privacy law at the beginning of 2013, pointing out the main developments in the field of last year and sketching what could happen in the year that just began.

The article focuses on the European developments in the data protection legal regime, as “what happens in the EU has an impact on multinational organizations operating across borders, and on the evolution of privacy frameworks around the world.”

Wolf writes about the main critiques the Regulation in its entirety faces, emerging especially from UK and also from France, but also discusses topical issues, such as “the right to be forgotten”.

In November 2012, Europe’s Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), released a report on the technical aspects of the “right to be forgotten”. ENISA pointed out that any technical solution for the “right to be forgotten” would require an unambiguous definition of the personal data that is covered by the “right to be forgotten”, a clear notion of who can enforce the right, and a mechanism for balancing the “right to be forgotten” against other rights such as freedom of expression. According to the Report, the text of the current European proposal leaves each of these subjects open to debate, making it difficult to implement technical mechanisms to deal with the “right to be forgotten”.

You can find the piece HERE.