Written by How time flies, GDPR has just had its first birthday!
This past year you will have been inundated with articles and blogs about GDPR and the impact on consumers and businesses alike. According to the UK’s Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, GDPR and its UK implementation, the Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018, has marked a “seismic shift in privacy and information rights”. Individuals are now more aware of their information rights and haven’t been shy about demanding it. In the UK, the ICO received around 14,000 personal data breach reports and over 41,000 data protection concerns from the public from 25 May 2018 to 1 May 2019, compared to around 3,300 PDB reports and 21,000 data protection concerns in the preceding year. Beyond Europe, the regulation has had a remarkable influence in other jurisdictions, where they have either enacted or are in the process of enacting a ‘GDPR equivalent’ law – something similar is underway in Brazil, Australia, California, Japan and South Korea.
With all the good intentions of GDPR some of its provisions contradict, other, equally well-intentioned EU laws. Bank Secrecy Laws on one hand, require that customers’ personal data should be protected and used for the intended purpose(s), except where otherwise consented to by the customer. AMLD4/5 on the other hand, requires that identifying personal data in ‘suspicious transactions’ should be passed on to appropriate national authorities (of course without the customer’s consent/ knowledge). Then PSD2 requires banks to open up customers’ data to authorised Third Party Providers (TPPs), subject to obtaining the customer’s consent. One issue that arises out of this is the seeming incongruity between Article 94 PSD2’s explicit consent, and GDPR’s (explicit) consent.
Under GDPR, consent is one of the lawful bases for processing personal data, subject to the strict requirements for obtaining, recording, and managing it, otherwise it’s deemed invalid. In some cases, a lack of good understanding of these rules has resulted in poor practices around consent processing. That is why organisations like the Kantara Initiative are leading the effort in developing specifications for ‘User Managed Access’ and ‘Consent Receipt’.
In addition, EU regulators have been weighing in to clarify some of the conundrums. For example, the Dutch DPA issued a guidance on the interplay of PSD2/GDPR, which shows that there’s no straightforward answer to what seems like a relatively simple question, as one might think. The EDPB has also published an opinion on the interplay between GDPR, and the slowly but surely evolving ePrivacy regulation. Suffice to say, correctly navigating the compliance requirements of all these laws are indeed challenging, but possible.
What will the second year of GDPR bring?
While regulators are keen to enforce the law, their priority is transparent co-operation, not penalties. The ICO has provided support tools, and guidance, including a dedicated help line and chat services to support SMEs. They are also in the process of “establishing a one-stop shop for SMEs, drawing together the expertise from across our regulatory teams to help us better support those organisations without the capacity or obligation to maintain dedicated in-house compliance resources.” However, for those who still choose to ‘wilfully or negligently break the law’, GDPR’s recommended administrative fines may help to focus the mind on what is at stake, in addition to the ‘cleaning up’ costs afterward. Supervisory Authorities require time and resources to investigate and clear the backlog as a result of the EU wide increase in information rights queries and complaints of the past one year. The UK’s ICO, and its Netherlands and Norwegian counterparts are collaborating to harmonise their approaches and establish a “matrix” for calculating fines. France’s CNIL has led the way with the $57 million Google fine earlier in the year, however, the ICO has confirmed that there will soon be fines for “a couple of very large cases that are in the pipeline, so also,the Irish DPC expects to levy “substantial” fines this summer.
A new but important principle in GDPR is the ‘accountability principle’ – which states that the data controller is responsible for complying with the regulation and must be able to demonstrate compliance. So, it is not enough to say, ‘we have it,’ you must be able to produce ‘appropriate evidence’ on demand to back it up. The ICO states in its ‘GDPR – one year on’ blog that “the focus for the second year of the GDPR must be beyond baseline compliance – organisations need to shift their focus to accountability with a real evidenced understanding of the risks to individuals in the way they process data and how those risks should be mitigated.” By now one would expect that most organisations would have put in the effort required beyond tick boxes to achieve an appropriate level of compliance with the regulation so they can reap the reward of continued business growth borne out of trust/loyalty from their customers.
One of the methods of demonstrating GDPR accountability is through a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) – a process by which organisations can systematically analyse, identify, and minimise the data protection risks of their project or plan ‘before going live.’ GDPR does not mandate a specific DPIA process, but expects whichever methodology chosen by the data controller to meet the requirements specified in its Article 35(7).
At Consult Hyperion, we have a long track record of thinking about the risks associated with transactional data, so much so that we published and continue to use our own Structured Risk Analysis (SRA) methodology. Our approach, in response to the needs of our customers, has always been to describe the technological risks in a language that allow the business owner, who ultimately owns the risk, to make a judgement. Building on this we have developed a business focused approach to GDPR compliant DPIA to help our customers, for the products we design, review, or develop for them.
If you’re interested in finding out more, please contact: sales@chyp.com
