Privacy stories of the week: the Trace round-up

It’s been a brilliant week at Trace as the team get ready to launch our software and continue deliver our professional services. We’ve been particularly busy with tech start ups and scale ups right now, delivering GDPR audits, tender and due diligence support, risk analysis, maturity roadmaps, and help with building a relatable and impactful Privacy by Design culture with client teams.

We also really enjoyed speaking at ProductTank at CodeBase at the start of the week, but we’ll share more about the key messages and insights from that event next week.

Globally, it’s been also been a week where Privacy has been back centre stage too, especially with Mark Zuckerberg’s somewhat bizarrely presented F8 which was all centred on Privacy. Certainly controversial from the poster boy for the surveillance capitalist model; here Business Insider offer a great critique on Zuck’s rhetoric versus reality.

So what are the other interesting privacy stories of the week? Here’s our quick fire round up of just a few which caught our attention:

• NS Tech explore the case for regulating algorithms - at Trace, our view is that this is an incredibly important area and data ethics has never been more important. However, the challenge remains on whether the regulators can keep up with the tech (a struggle). We absolutely agree though that transparency and trust should be at forefront of AI

• The EDPS investigate contractual agreements between the EU and Microsoft as to whether they are fully compliant with data protection rules. - At Trace we expect a further spotlight on contracts and cloud in the compliance space

• Italy issue their first GDPR fine this week - again highlighting the importance of security measures, after a data breach

• And Helen Dixon (the prominent Irish Data Commissioner) was speaking to the US senate this week - apparently the first batch of major GDPR investigations into big tech will conclude this Summer, so it’s very much a case of watch this space.