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Data watchdog ‘extremely concerned’ on failure to locate suitable office
Regulator frustrated at OPW’s inability to identify suitable offices as workforce trebles
9 hours ago

"The regulator overseeing the handling of personal data is “extremely concerned” about the ability of the Office of Public Works to find a permanent office for its growing workforce in Dublin.

The Data Protection Commission raised concerns with the Department of Justice in November about the OPW’s continual rejection of potentially suitable offices for a staff that has trebled in five years.

New EU-wide rules on the handling of personal data by companies introduced under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018 has led to a massive increase in the commission’s workload.

Data Protection Commissioner Helen Dixon and her senior staff told the department at a meeting on November 16th that the watchdog had received almost 2,000 complaints in the five months since the introduction of the new rules, compared with about 2,600 received during the whole of 2017.

The commission’s budget has increased from €1.9 million in 2014 to €15.2 million this year, while staff numbers have gone from about 40 to a target of 160 staff by the end of this year. It has, however, struggled to find a single suitable office for its workforce in the rapid scaling-up of its activities.

The watchdog told the department that its office on Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin city centre had been “over-capacity” since June 2017 and that it had to secure temporary accommodation in serviced offices.

The commission told department officials that “in light of the serious pressure” on it for office accommodation, it had to secure a floor in the Trinity Point building opposite Trinity College and this was the only temporary offices available other than “significantly higher-cost” serviced offices.

The Dublin offices are in addition to a building occupied by the watchdog in Portarlington, Co Laois.

Frustration
The department was told by the commission that it expected to exceed capacity in the Fitzwilliam Square and Trinity Point offices “at some stage during 2019” due to ongoing recruitment and the expected increase in the number of staff being hired to meet the watchdog’s increasing workload.

The commission expressed frustration at the pace of the OPW’s search for a suitable single office for its Dublin staff, telling the department that some of the properties identified by the OPW represented “good permanent office accommodation solutions in terms of location, facilities, appearance and size”.

“In its engagement with OPW, the [commission] is concerned that the OPW continues to identify reasons why each building under consideration is not suitable to be progressed by OPW,” the commission said in the briefing note for the department released under the Freedom of Information Act.

“Furthermore, it should be noted that it is unlikely that any of these accommodation options would be available before the end of 2019. Consequently the [commission] continues to be extremely concerned about the ability of OPW to secure a permanent office in the near future.”

International spotlight
A spokesman for the commission said it continued to engage “intensively” with the OPW on identifying a permanent office in Dublin but it expected that this “may not be available before 2020.”

The watchdog’s pay bill, €8.9 million for 2019, accounts for the bulk of its budget of €15.2 million for this year. It had sought a budget of almost €17 million and hoped to increase staff numbers to 180 by the end of 2019 but trimmed this to 160 with the lower budget granted.

The commission has warned the department in the past that the regulator’s reputation and that of Ireland is in the international spotlight because the one-stop-shop mechanism under EU privacy rules makes the DPC the de facto EU regulator of major internet companies such as Facebook and Twitter.

A spokesman for the OPW said it had been working for some time with the commission in the search for a new headquarters for its expanding staff numbers and this had “proved challenging in the current Dublin office market.”

“Several options are currently under consideration in conjunction with the DPC to meet the commission’s specific requirements and it is hoped to bring this process to a conclusion in the coming months,” he said."

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/data-watchdog-extremely-concerned-on-failure-to-locate-suitable-office-1.3780798

DATA PROTECTION TO SCALE NEW HEIGHTS IN 2019 THANKS TO GDPR-LIKE REGULATIONS GLOBALLY
FEB 04, 2019

"The year 2018 witnessed one of the most revolutionary regulations in the last 20 years of data protection — the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. In fact, within the last year, including GDPR, there have been around 100 new data protection laws enacted in countries around the world, and for many, this is a first-time law.

The new regulations, in essence, give data the same supremacy as oil, defining it as an important asset to be held and dealt with far more cautiously. The new legislation is not only anticipated to be instrumental in reshaping the way in which data is handled across every sector — from healthcare to travel to banking and beyond — but also provides a baseline for drafting data protection guidelines the world over.

The new breed of privacy professional
With the introduction of stringent data protection laws in many countries, companies across the world are focusing on taking steps to embed privacy as part of the organisation’s strategy. With this comes the realisation that a sound data privacy management framework is critical for the reputation of the company / brand and can also directly impact the bottom-line in a positive way.

From an operational point of view, the reality is that many companies are still grappling with how to ensure compliance with the new regulations within existing frameworks. Clearly, it is an uphill task for most.

It is not surprising that a new trend we are seeing is the moving of privacy out of the purview of the legal and the Information Security teams, and creating a new role of the privacy professional. Indeed, privacy and data protection management is already becoming a new profession in its own right.

Usually, individuals best suited for this role have a background in IT security, good knowledge of the business lines, and who have become legally trained in the data protection legislation that applies to the organisation’s theatre of operations.

This has also created an educational space for companies and for people to start up-skilling themselves in this area. This is just the start as we will see sub-specialities of privacy professional developing especially in the realm of AI and machine learning.

Increased infrastructure and investment
Organisations are allocating more resources in creating a robust data protection framework that ensures radical changes in the way data is managed.

2019 will see businesses of all sizes streamlining their operations to accommodate the new legislation to avoid, detect and recover from a data breach.

A lawful basis is everything
One of the major impacts of the implementation of GDPR is that it compels businesses to demonstrate a ‘lawful basis’ for processing a set of personal data. Unlike earlier, when regulations were less robust, companies held all kinds of data for indeterminate periods of time. Now organisations will have to take into account, firstly, the purpose for which they are collecting personal data, and secondly, the extent of the data collected.

This means that data can no longer be stored after the purpose is served, or use for another purpose such as marketing.

Also, social media posts, location, biometrics, IP addresses, etc. are handled in the same manner and with equal importance, as dictated by GDPR. If organisations aren't able to identify a lawful basis to hold data, they will have to let go of the data in order to remain compliant.

Multi-layered approach replaces fallible methods
Naturally, no organisation wants to experience a data breach as it brings with it the loss of trust and even revenue for a company. However, it is, unfortunately, an inevitable risk that an organisation has to account for. Hopefully, when it occurs it is only minor in nature. In order to limit reputational and financial loss that a data breach can cause, the coming year will see industries and organisations replacing scattered methods of data protection with methods that will reduce the impact of a data breach.

At the moment, industries are standing at the threshold of a data revolution. While past regulations have changed the course of the journey and conversations around the importance of data protection, future regulations will only add to the various methods of implementation.

In India particularly, data protection legislation will provie a springboard to the Indian outsourcing and data processing industry as it will make it easier for other countries with similar regulations to exchange data with India. As similar regulation gets increasingly implemented globally, it will hold most organisations to the same high standards of data management, and put the control of data back in the hands of the individual – where it belongs."

https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/data-protection-to-scale-new-heights-in-2019-thanks-to-gdpr-like-regulations-globally-6021601.html

Proof that Facebook is going down — despite its big earnings
February 2, 2019

"The social-media behemoth you love to hate posted some gaudy fourth-quarter earnings numbers on Wednesday. The report got a lot of likes on Wall Street. Some said it meant founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had finally turned the page on an otherwise terrible year.

Not so fast. Something else happened to Facebook last week that may say more about the company’s long-term health than any happy-dappy earnings statement.

The website TechCruch reported on Tuesday that Facebook has been paying users between the ages of 13 and 35 to install a VPN, or virtual private network, on their phones. The users get $20 a month; Facebook gets access to … well, everything.

The Facebook Research VPN app hoovered up all incoming and outgoing data. Not just Facebook data — all data, from web browsing to texting to activity on other apps. According to TechCruch, “Facebook went so far as to ask users to screenshot and submit their Amazon order history.”

So who has a problem with Facebook paying people to harvest their data?

Apple, that’s who.

Facebook's latest privacy scandal sparks feud with Apple
The iPhone maker is a top dog in the platform game. And the company has rules developers must abide by if they want to use iOS or do business in the App Store. With its pay-to-play research app, Facebook broke those rules. The Cupertino boys weren’t happy.

Punishment was swift — Apple revoked Facebook’s access to its “enterprise developer” program, which enables companies to bypass the App Store when they want to build an application for internal corporate use. That spiked the VPN but also many of the apps that Facebook employees use to message each other and set up meetings. They even use them to order lunch, poor things.

Several outlets reported that Apple’s actions this week sparked two days of chaos at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. Apparently, 6,000 high-paid, hoody-clad millennials can’t work at all if they can’t work online. (But if punishment was swift, so was mercy. Apple relented late Thursday and restored Facebook’s internal apps. Silicon Valley’s best and brightest could once again order up their bacon kimchi hot dogs and reserve seats on the corporate shuttle bus to Golden Gate Park.)"

Read more...
ps://nypost.com/2019/02/02/proof-that-facebook-is-going-down-despite-its-big-earnings/