When is Data an Injury?

Author: Clarip’s Director of Sales

If you were to ask the typical American citizen to cite some landmark Supreme Court cases, I would expect that you would most likely get a litany of known cases, ranging from Roe vs Wade to Brown vs. Board of Education.  For even the average American citizen, the rulings in these cases – reproductive rights and desegregation of schools, respectively – were of such import, that most people would recognize the rights enshrined therein.  For Europeans, however, the comparable case might be well be Google Spain v AEPD and Mario Costeja González.  In sum, this case bestowed a fundamental right upon citizens in the EU, that until then was unrecognized – that is, the “right to be forgotten.”

As regular readers of my blog may know, I wear “two hats” in my professional life – former constitutional law professor and current Director of Sales for Clarip.  For me, this case is especially germane as it relates to how companies can interact with citizens and customers in the virtual world and it is this fact that should keep every CPO, CISO and General Counsel of American company up at night.  According to Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), “the European Court of Justice ruled that the European citizens have a right to request that commercial search firms, such as Google, that gather personal information for profit should remove links to private information when asked, provided the information is no longer relevant. The Court also found that the fundamental right to privacy is greater than the economic interest of the commercial firm and, in some circumstances, the public interest interest in access to information.

In a world in which companies have a footprint in countries all over the world – suppliers, customers, software providers – the reality is that with the EU’s recognition of privacy as a fundamental right, the onus is now on the companies and not the customers to defend it customers’ privacy and data.  Come May 2018, and the implementation of GDPR, that responsibility also comes with a price tag– 4% of a companies’ global turnover of the parent company or 20 million euros, whichever is HIGHER!

The simple fact is that today, with both the omnipresence of the internet and the plethora of data/information therein, it is fair to say that every company – American and European – will be affected in some way by both Costeja and GDPR.  That is why I recommend that you visit www.clarip.com.  Clarip is an artificial intelligence based data and privacy management platform that satisfies several of the core requirements of GDPR.  As any physician will tell you, “the best medicine is always preventative medicine.”

More from Clarip:

Are you ready for the new CA privacy law? Start preparing compliance efforts with Clarip for the California Consumer Privacy Act. Enforcement starts January 1, 2020 so better start planning funding in your 2019 budget now.