This week, yours truly is taking you to London where the IAPP held its Data Protection Intensive: UK 2022. Headliners included U.K. Information Commissioner John Edwards, economist Daniel Susskind and behavioral and data scientist Pragya Agarwal. In his first major public address since taking the role, Commissioner Edwards wanted to provide reassurance in times of uncertainty, including on current plans to revisit the UK General Data Protection Regulation. He said these plans are driven by a clear intention to reduce burden, create a streamlined law that strengthens people’s privacy rights while not putting adequacy at risk.

There was a lot of talk among attendees on the extent of these expected changes, how significant they will be from a practical perspective and whether they will constitute constructive disruption for global privacy discussions or be dangerously close to a tipping point endangering the adequacy finding from the EU. Anticipated changes to the UK GDPR should all start to become clearer in spring.

As it turns out, there was another noteworthy development in the U.K. this week as the International Data Transfer Agreements came into force 21 March, following a public consultation last fall. Organizations can now use the IDTA or the Addendum to EU Standard Contractual Clauses as a transfer tool to comply with Article 46 of the UK GDPR when making restricted transfers. All of the documents are available on the ICO’s website, in both PDF and Word formats which will is always a nice touch. And we are left wanting more as additional tools, such as a clause-by-clause guidance and guidance on transfer risk assessments, will be released in the next few months.

Elsewhere in Europe:

• EU legislators are closing in on an agreement on the Digital Markets Act, the new competition legislative instrument aimed at “preventing gatekeepers from imposing unfair conditions on businesses and consumers and at ensuring the openness of important digital services.” For a quick snapshot of what the original DMA proposal is (and isn’t), see here.
• The EDPB just opened a public consultation on its "Guidelines on Dark patterns in social media platform interfaces: How to recognise and avoid them," running through 2 May.

Photo by Yannis Papanastasopoulos on Unsplash