Today pdpecho inaugurates a weekly post curating research articles/papers/studies or dissertations in the field of data protection and privacy, that are available under an open access regime and that were recently published.
Source: http://www.androidauthority.com
This week there are three recommended pieces for your weekend read. The first article, published by researchers from Queen Mary University of London and Cambridge University, provides an analysis of the impact of using machine learning to conduct profiling of individuals in the context of the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
The second article is the view of a researcher specialised in International Development, from the University of Amsterdam, on the new trend in humanitarian work to consider data as a public good, regardless of whether it is personal or not.
The last paper is a draft authored by a law student at Yale (published on SSRN), which explores an interesting phenomenon: how data brokers have begun to sell data products to individual consumers interested in tracking the activities of love interests, professional contacts, and other people of interest. The paper underlines that the US privacy law system lacks protection for individuals whose data are sold in this scenario and proposes a solution.
1) Machine Learning with Personal Data (by Dimitra Kamarinou, Christopher Millard, Jatinder Singh)
“This paper provides an analysis of the impact of using machine learning to conduct profiling of individuals in the context of the EU General Data Protection Regulation.
We look at what profiling means and at the right that data subjects have not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produce legal effects concerning them or significantly affect them. We also look at data subjects’ right to be informed about the existence of automated decision-making, including profiling, and their right to receive meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and the envisaged consequences of such processing.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of relevant data protection rights and obligations to machine learning, including implications for the development and deployment of machine learning systems and the ways in which personal data are collected and used. In particular, we consider what compliance with the first data protection principle of lawful, fair, and transparent processing means in the context of using machine learning for profiling purposes. We ask whether automated processing utilising machine learning, including for profiling purposes, might in fact offer benefits and not merely present challenges in relation to fair and lawful processing.”
The paper was published as “Queen Mary School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 247/2016″.
2) The ethics of Big Data as a public good: which public? Whose good? (by Linnet Taylor)
“International development and humanitarian organizations are increasingly calling for digital data to be treated as a public good because of its value in supplementing scarce national statistics and informing interventions, including in emergencies. In response to this claim, a ‘responsible data’ movement has evolved to discuss guidelines and frameworks that will establish ethical principles for data sharing. However, this movement is not gaining traction with those who hold the highest-value data, particularly mobile network operators who are proving reluctant to make data collected in low- and middle-income countries accessible through intermediaries.
This paper evaluates how the argument for ‘data as a public good’ fits with the corporate reality of big data, exploring existing models for data sharing. I draw on the idea of corporate data as an ecosystem involving often conflicting rights, duties and claims, in comparison to the utilitarian claim that data’s humanitarian value makes it imperative to share them. I assess the power dynamics implied by the idea of data as a public good, and how differing incentives lead actors to adopt particular ethical positions with regard to the use of data.”
This article is part of the themed issue ‘The ethical impact of data science’ in “Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society A”.
3) What Happens When an Acquaintance Buys Your Data?: A New Privacy Harm in the Age of Data Brokers (by Theodore Rostow)
“Privacy scholarship to date has failed to consider a new development in the commercial privacy landscape. Data brokers have begun to sell data products to individual consumers interested in tracking the activities of love interests, professional contacts, and other people of interest. This practice creates an avenue for a new type of privacy harm — “insider control” — which privacy scholarship has yet to recognize.
U.S. privacy laws fail to protect consumers from the possibility of insider control. Apart from two noteworthy frameworks that might offer paths forward, none of the viable reforms offered by privacy scholars would meaningfully limit consumers’ vulnerability. This Note proposes changes to existing privacy doctrines in order to reduce consumers’ exposure to this new harm.”
This paper was published as a draft on SSRN. According to SSRN, the final version will be published in the 34th volume of the Yale Journal on Regulation.
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pdpEcho 
The GDPR already started to appear in CJEU’s soft case-law (AG Opinion in Manni)
CJEU’s AG Bot referred to the GDPR in his recent ‘right to be forgotten’ Opinion
It may only become applicable on 25 May 2018, but the GDPR already made its official debut in the case-law of the CJEU.
It was the last paragraph (§101) of the Conclusions of AG Bot in Case C-398/15 Manni, published on 8 September, that specifically referred to Regulation 2016/679 (the official name of the GDPR). The case concerns the question of whether the right to erasure (the accurate name of the more famous “right to be forgotten”) as enshrined in Article 12 of Directive 95/46 also applies in the case of personal data of entrepreneurs recorded in the Public Registry of companies, if their organisation went bankrupt years ago. Curiously, the preliminary ruling question doesn’t specifically refer to the right to erasure, but to the obligation in Article 6(1)(e) for controllers not to retain the data longer than necessary to achieve the purpose for which they were collected.
In fact, Mr Manni had requested his regional Chamber of Commerce to erase his personal data from the Public Registry of Companies, after he found out that he was losing clients who performed background checks on him through a private company that specialised in finding information in the Public Registry. This happened because Mr Manni had been an administrator of a company that was declared bankrupt more than 10 years before the facts in the main proceedings. In fact, the former company itself was radiated from the Public Registry (§30).
Disclaimer! The Opinion is not yet available in English, but in another handful of official languages of the EU. Therefore, the following quotes are all my translation from French or Romanian.
AG Bot advised the Court to reply to the preliminary ruling questions in the sense that all personal data in the Public Registry of companies should be retained there indefinitely, irrespective of the fact that companies to whose administrators the data refer are still active or not. “Public Registries of companies cannot achieve their main purpose, namely the consolidation of legal certainty by disclosing, in accordance with the transparency principle, legally accurate information, if access to this information would not be allowed indefinitely to all third parties” (§98).
The AG adds that “the choice of natural persons to get involved in the economic life through a commercial company implies a permanent requirement of transparency. For this main reason, detailed throughout the Opinion, I consider that the interference in the the right to the protection of personal data that are registered in a Public Registry of companies, specifically ensuring their publicity for an indefinite period of time and aimed towards any person who asks for access to these data, is justified by the preponderant interest of third parties to access those data” (§100).
Restricting the circle of ‘interested third parties’ would be incompatible with the purpose of the Public Registry
Before reaching this conclusion, the AG dismissed a proposal by the Commission that suggested a limited access to the personal data of administrators of bankrupt companies could be ensured only for those third parties that “show a legitimate interest” in obtaining it.
The AG considered that this suggestion “cannot, at this stage of development of EU law, ensure a fair balance between the objective of protecting third parties and the right to the protection of personal data registered in Public Registries of companies” (§87). In this regard, he recalled that the objective to protect the interest of third parties as enshrined in the First Council Directive 68/151 “is provided for in a sufficiently wide manner so as to encompass not only the creditors of a company, but also, in general, all persons that want to obtain information regarding that company” (§88).
Earlier, the AG had also found that the suggestion to anonymise data regarding the administrators of bankrupt companies is not compatible with the historical function of the Public Registry and with the objective to protect third parties that is inherent to such registries. “The objective to establish a full picture of a bankrupt company is incompatible with processing anonymous data” (§78).
Throughout the Opinion, the AG mainly interprets the principles underpinning the First Council Directive 68/151/EC (of 9 March 1968 on co-ordination of safeguards which, for the protection of the interests of members and others, are required by Member States of companies within the meaning of the second paragraph of Article 58 of the Treaty, with a view to making such safeguards equivalent throughout the Community) and it is apparent that it enjoys precedence over Directive 95/46/EC.
Finally: the reference to the GDPR
The AG never refers in his analysis to Article 12 of Directive 95/46, which grants data subjects the right to erasure. However, come the last paragraph of the Opinion, the AG does refer to Article 17(3)(b) and (d) from Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (yes, the GDPR). He applies Article 17 GDPR to the facts of the case and mentions that the preceding analysis “is compatible” with it, because “this Article provides that the right to erasure of personal data, or ‘the right to be forgotten’, does not apply to a processing operation ‘for compliance with a legal obligation which requires processing by Union or Member State law to which the controller is subject or for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller’ or ‘for archiving purposes in the public interest'” (§101).
While I find the Opinion of the AG clear and well argued, I have two comments. I wish he had referred more comprehensively to the fundamental rights aspect of the case when balancing the provisions of the two directives. But most of all, I wish he would have analysed the right to erasure itself, the conditions that trigger it and the exemptions under Article 13 of Directive 95/46.
My bet on the outcome of the case: the Court will follow the AG’s Opinion to a large extent. However, it may be more focused on the fundamental rights aspect of balancing the two Directives and it may actually analyse the content of the right to erasure and its exceptions. The outcome, however, is likely to be the same.
A small thing that bugs me about this case is that I find there is a differentiation between searching a Registry of Companies being interested in a company name and searching a Registry of Companies being interested in a specific natural person. I mean, all third parties may very well be interested in finding out everything there is to know about bankrupt Company X, discovering thus that Mr Manni was the administrator. To me, this does not seem to be the same situation as searching the Public Registry of companies using Mr Manni’s name to find out all about Mr Manni’s background. In §88 the AG even mentions, when recognising the all encompassing interest of every third party to access all information about a certain company indefinitely, that Directive 68/151 protects the interest of “all persons that want to obtain information regarding this company“. I know the case is about keeping or deleting the personal data of Mr Manni from the Registry. And ultimately it is important to keep the information there due to the general interest of knowing everything about the history of a company. However, does it make any difference for the lawfulness of certain processing operations related to the data in the Registry that the Registry of companies is used to create profiles of natural persons? I don’t know. But it’s something that bugged me while reading the Opinion. Moreover, if you compare this situation to the “clean slate” rules for certain offenders that have their data erased from the criminal record, it is even more bugging. (Note: at §34 the AG specifies he is only referring in his Opinion to the processing of personal data by the Chamber of Commerce and not by private companies specialising in providing background information about entrepreneurs).
Fun fact #1
The GDPR made its ‘unofficial’ debut in the case-law of the CJEU in the Opinion of AG Jaaskinen in C-131/14 Google v. Spain delivered on 25 June 2013. In fact, it was precisely Article 17 that was referred to in this Opinion as well, in §110. There’s another reference to the GDPR in §56, mentioning the new rules on the field of application of EU data protection law. Back then, the text of the GDPR was merely a proposal of the Commission – nor the EP, or the Council had adopted their own versions of the text, before entering the trilogue which resulted in the adopted text of Regulation 2016/679.
Fun fact #2
AG Bot is the AG that the delivered the Opinion in the Schrems case as well. The Court followed his Opinion to a large extent for its Judgment. There are fair chances the Court will follow again his Opinion.
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Tagged AG Bot, AG Jaaskinen, AG Opinion in Manni, data protection, GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, manni, personal data in the public registry of companies, privacy, public registry of companies and data protection, right to be forgotten, right to erasure