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An agreement has been found regulating the protection of information, but it has an expiration date: Brussels fears that London wants to weaken the Gdpr

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On June 28, the European Commission published the agreement that will regulate the transfer of personal data between the European Union and the United Kingdom. After Brexit this was a much needed and expected step to define the way in which companies from the old continent and those across the Channel can manage their customers' information.

Why it is important to have an agreement

The current stalemate in the similar situation between the United States and the European Union demonstrates that this is a crucial node of the data economy. Almost a year ago, the European Court of Justice canceled for the second time the agreement that allowed the transfer of personal data between the two sides of the Atlantic because it did not sufficiently guarantee European citizens.

The lack of an agreement does not in itself block the possibility of transferring these data but increases the burden of businesses in verifying that the third country has adequate legislation on data protection. The data can always be transferred under a contract between the company and its cloud provider, for example. But what is guaranteed in the contract must correspond to the real state of things and not just theoretical. Where, on the other hand, there is an agreement between the European Union and the third country, that control will already have been done by the Commission. For this reason, it will be enough for the companies to tell them to base the transfer on that agreement, making everything simpler.

The peculiarity of the English case

The UK case theoretically should not have required much effort on the bargaining side. Since Brexit took place after the entry into force of the GDPR, the English legislation is practically the same as that of the 27 countries of the Union. But to alert the institutions, and especially the European Parliament, there were several news that suggest that Johnson's government could soon go to modify some articles of the data protection law. The Open Rights Group organization denounced how the government task force report on innovation, growth and regulatory reforms proposed to deregulate the GDPR to "accelerate growth in the digital economy and improve people's productivity and lives by freeing them from burdens compliance requirements ".

In addition, the task force proposes to abolish Article 22 of the Gdpr which guarantees that, in the event of a decision originating from an automated process, people have the opportunity to request verification by an operator. The reason is that this protection for the task force "makes it burdensome, costly and impractical for organizations to use AI to automate routine processes." Too bad that some of these routine processes have considerable impacts on people's lives. Think of questions for a mortgage or a job interview rejected for an obscure logic and without the possibility of speaking to an employee who can review the decision of the algorithm or artificial intelligence. Multiply this case by those millions of people who have a lesser understanding of these processes and do not know that, for example, by not entering some keywords the question will be automatically rejected, to imagine the result.

To this is added the recent sentence of the European Court of Human Rights which has recently recognized that the mass surveillance carried out by the British security services to the detriment of citizens was illegal because it was disproportionate and absent from any safeguard. Given the UK curriculum and pressure from the European Parliament, the Commission has established, exceptionally compared to similar agreements with other countries, that the agreement has a duration of four years after which it will be reviewed for possible renewal. However, the Commission will retain the right to cancel it if the UK changes its privacy legislation in a pejorative way within four years.


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Topics

Brexit Europe Gdpr Privacy United Kingdom globalData.fldTopic = "Brexit, Europe, Gdpr , Privacy, United Kingdom "

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