Nonpersonal data is at the forefront of modern data analytics. In general, anonymized or deidentified personal data is not in the scope of privacy and data protection regulations, offering freedom from the restrictions of privacy compliance while allowing for greater data utilization. However, despite the growing demand for techniques to anonymize or deidentify personal data, this issue remains a topic of intense discussion at the intersection of privacy law and engineering. One part of the pro... Read More

In the same week the European Court of Justice published three rulings on the interpretation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, clarifying details around subject access requests, immaterial damages and accountability, another EU court handed down a landmark ruling on the concept of personal data, which has largely gone unnoticed. Although this ruling did not make it into the headlines, it will undoubtedly have a much bigger impact on the work of privacy professionals in Europe and bey... Read More

On Sept. 5, 2020, the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 713, which amends the California Consumer Privacy Act. Although the bill has the primary and helpful effect of largely exempting the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act deidentified information from the CCPA, AB 713 also regulates deidentified information in a novel way that departs from the mostly hands-off approach to such datasets adopted by federal and state regulators. As has been the case with many of th... Read More

The California Consumer Privacy Act is notorious for the haste with which it was drafted. Many provisions of the statute require clarification, and the attorney general’s office is holding a series of public forums before issuing clarifying regulations. Among the concepts not well defined by the CCPA are deidentification, pseudonymization, and aggregation. It's helpful to take a look at some of the challenges the CCPA creates with its imprecise language regarding these topics and point out of t... Read More

As with so many things in this world, there is rarely, if ever, a silver-bullet solution to a complex problem in privacy. Perhaps the most glaring example of this is in defining the identifiability of an individual.  Countless privacy laws and regulations around the world define personal information or personally identifiable information in different ways, using varying definitions and key terms. One jurisdiction may consider an IP address PII while another may not. The Federal Trade Commission... Read More

Open data initiatives are increasing everywhere. These are often driven by the public sector aiming to promote data availability to trigger innovation and eventually better services. The basic concept is to make data available publicly with no constraints on who can access the data and what they can do with it. It is important to ensure that these open data initiatives do not release personal information. Concurrent with open data are freedom of information laws which allow citizens to request ... Read More