2020. Which was the biggest challenge for the privacy professionals during this year? (2)
by Sypher | Published in News - January 07, 2021
2020 was a complicated year for the whole world. The data protection and privacy fields were not speared by the changes and challenges the pandemic brought. Privacy specialists had to deal with remote working, health checks for people entering an organizations’ premises, Brexit, or Schrems II.
We asked three privacy professionals to tell us which was the biggest challenge for them during this year.
According to Cristiana Deca, privacy expert, the main challenge was” balancing the panic from Covid19 and staying objective when assessing measures taken by companies to prevent the spread of the virus. Fear is something that changes the way you see things, so balancing data subject rights and Covid19 measures was the hardest part”.
Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna, Senior Counsel for Global Privacy states that: “There were many challenges worth mentioning”. She continues: “I will start with the challenge of figuring out how to deal with the aftermath of the Schrems II judgment. How to ensure the organizations they are working for or advising are not transferring personal data to the US and the rest of the world unlawfully? Keep in mind that the European Data Protection Authorities have made it clear that merely accessing from the outside of the EU data in a cloud in the EU counts as a transfer. So even if businesses are not having clients or business partners in the US or in other countries, but they are using online services and cloud services managed or administered by personnel outside of the EU, with access to their data, they should at least make an assessment of whether they are transferring data outside for the EU and if so, under what conditions.”
“Another challenge was ensuring all the pandemic measures at work and elsewhere are not unnecessarily interfering with the right to privacy of employees, students, patients, restaurant-goers, and so on. I don't think there is any privacy professional who didn't have to work on ensuring data protection and privacy are both respected by measures to fight the pandemic”, added Dr. Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna.
“The biggest challenge is by far the fall of several economic verticals like travel and hospitality which affected business services for these verticals: IT, insurance, car manufacturing, etc”, says Tudor Galos, Privacy consultant. “Many lost their jobs and their businesses, putting huge pressure on the economy and the state budget. So, privacy professionals had to deal with delayed payments, customers going out of business, and new privacy challenges like balancing employees’ privacy with company information security. We had to quickly adapt, communicate, develop best practices, and implement best practices”, added Tudor Galos.
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