Photo of Susan Foster

Susan Foster

Subscribe to Susan Foster's Posts

Susan Foster is a Member in the Corporate & Securities Section, practicing in the firm’s London office. She works with clients primarily on data protection, licensing, collaborations, and commercial matters in the fields of clean tech, high tech, mobile media, and life sciences. She has represented a broad range of clients from start-up companies to international industry leaders and has significant experience with cross-border transactions. She is qualified in England and Wales as well as California, and has experience practicing law in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

Follow: Susan's Twitter Profile

 

In this edition of the “Innocents Abroad” series, Susan Foster discusses the privacy considerations that come into play when an employee loses a laptop containing customer data abroad!

 

From: Ned Help

To: Carrie Counselor

Subject:  Lost laptop containing European customer information

Carrie,

A couple of weeks ago, you wrote me about an employee who will be engaging in a six-month temporary assignment around Europe to scope market opportunities. The employee was Abbie Absent-Minded.  Well, we hit a snag pretty quickly.  Abbie just e-mailed me to say that she left her laptop on a train in London last evening and it hasn’t turned up yet in the train company’s lost-and-found.  It was a brand-new laptop that we had given her for her European assignment, so fortunately it didn’t have a lot on it.  Abbie said that the laptop had contact information for her various marketing prospects, plus some sample customer data that she was given by one of her prospects to use in a demo of our web-based advertising product.  She thinks that the customer data included around 200 records with the customer’s name, age, gender, e-mail address and the history of purchases that the customer made from our prospective client’s retail stores.

I assume that we should tell our prospective client that the laptop with their customer data was lost.  What else do we need to think about?

Thanks,

Ned

 

Continue Reading Innocents Abroad: Lost laptop with customer data

We now have a precise date for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation to go into effect: May 25, 2018.  The official version has been published and is available here.  The GDPR, in its official published version, contains 87 densely-packed pages of recitals and articles, and many new and expanded obligations for both “controllers” and “processors” of personal data.  Many companies will need the full two years’ lead time to bring their operations and contracts into compliance.  (Read our bullet point summary here.)

The Article 29 Working Party has released opinions on Privacy Shield and “essential guarantees” under EU law relating to surveillance, here and here.

Please join us in our webinar at 1 pm EDT today to learn more about the Article 29 Working Party’s opinion on Privacy Shield (register here).  We will look at the opinion’s likely impact on Privacy Shield’s rocky progress through the EU bureaucracy, as well as on the legal attacks that we expect Privacy Shield will face if and when it is ultimately adopted by the Commission.

 

UPDATE: The Article 29 Working Party has released surprisingly brief comments on Privacy Shield, available here.  Consistent with the press briefing held earlier today (see below), WP29 has concluded that Privacy Shield falls short without providing specific guidance as to what, exactly, an acceptable version of Privacy Shield would look like.

Earlier today, the Article 29 Working Party (“WP29”) held a press conference to give a preview of its assessment of the proposed EU-US Privacy Shield arrangements that were slated to replace the struck-down Safe Harbor program and bring much-needed certainty to companies that transfer personal data from the EU to the US.

While full comments will be available later today, we know now that WP29 has declined to give Privacy Shield its support.  It appears that WP29 has serious concerns about the limitations of US national security agencies to conduct mass surveillance.  WP29 is also skeptical about the rights of redress for EU residents and would prefer that EU residents be able to bring complaints immediately via their local EU data protection authorities.    We will cover the WP29 assessment more fully during our webinar on Thursday, April 14.  Register here.  In the meantime, for those who would like to listen to the press briefing, an audio recording is available here:  https://scic.ec.europa.eu/streaming/article-29-working-party