GDPR News Bytes – 26th September 2018

  1. Google recently made a quiet change to its Chrome browser: signing into any web service now signs you into Google Chrome. This change has alarmed many of its privacy-conscious users, who claim it violates its privacy policy by synchronizing the login states of its products.

 

  1. EU antitrust commissioner Margarethe Vestager will deliver the keynote speech at an antitrust (called “competition” in European parlance) and tech symposium in Washington D.C. on Tuesday. An eclectic audience of foreign government officials from Brazil and Japan, as well as FTC heads and industry leaders, will be in attendance.

 

  1. Tesco faces a record fine in the U.K. of more than £30 million over a 2016 cyberattack against many Tesco Bank account members. Regulators are becoming more concerned about the apparent increase in IT system failures – just last week, Barclays, NatWest, and RBS experienced technical failures leaving millions of customers without access to their online accounts.

 

  1. Věra Jourová, EU Commissioner for justice, consumers, and gender equality, shut down her Facebook account after receiving an “influx of hatred” through the platform. In a subsequent news conference, Jourová warned that Facebook faces the prospect of large sanctions if it fails to comply with consumer protection rules.

 

  1. On Wednesday, US lobbying groups such as the Internet Association and the US Chamber of Commerce will give testimonies alongside tech firms such as Twitter, Google, and Microsoft at the Senate Commerce Committee on data privacy and consumer protection. Twitter, for one, plans to suggest that “any federal framework should be interoperable with other legal structures worldwide” – signaling a nudge for any American regulation to fit with existing frameworks such as the GDPR.

 

  1. The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued its first GDPR enforcement notice to AggregateIQ (AIQ) for data management violations related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The Canadian company is attempting to postpone the audit and potential fine through the appeals process.