15 May 2023
On May 5th, 2023, our Privacy Lawyers, Maria Antoniadou and Melina Loizou, attended the “REDA 2023 International Conference: Regulation and Enforcement in the Digital Age”. The conference was organized by the European University Cyprus and brought together local and foreign academics and professionals, with the aim of initiating dialogue on significant topics that have emerged in the digital age, including Artificial Intelligence, Data Protection, Online Copyright Law and Cyber-Criminality.
During the discussion on regulation and enforcement in the field of Data Protection, the esteemed speakers presented and shared their views and expertise on key areas, such as the execution of Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), the increased obligations for transparency of the processing operations carried out by organizations and the importance of identifying a legitimate basis for the processing, stemming from the recent decisions of the Data Protection Commission of Ireland against Meta and WhatsApp.
Furthermore, the speakers reflected on some of the recent decisions issued by Data Protection Authorities across multiple Member States, thereby evidencing the key areas that national Data Protection Authorities are now focusing on, such as the submission of requests from data subjects for the exercise of their rights and the procedure followed by organizations when handling those requests.
The conference has overall demonstrated that Data Protection is a field which is constantly emerging, and both privacy professionals and organizations must keep pace with the developments. Furthermore, it has become evident that Data Protection Authorities have not taken their supervisory role lightly, but they are rather becoming increasingly involved in the monitoring of the organizations’ compliance with their obligations and do not hesitate to impose onerous fines in cases of violation of the GDPR’s provisions.
Privacy Minders applauds such kind of initiatives that trigger dialogue on important data protection and privacy-related issues and would like to thank the European University Cyprus for hosting such an insightful and fruitful discussion.