The Advocate General’s (“AG”) Opinion in Case C-311/18, Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland and Maximillian Schrems (“Schrems II”), has been delayed until the 19th December 2019.  (The original publication date was set for the week before, on the 12th December.) The primary question before the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”), and the AG, in Schrems II is whether the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses (“SCCs”) are valid for transfers of personal data to the…

On November 14, 2019, the EDPB adopted a final version of Guidelines 3/2018 on the territorial scope of the GDPR (Art. 3). This takes into account the contributions and feedback that the EDPB received during a public consultation on a draft version of the guidelines (see here). The draft version of the guidelines raised many questions, which the final version aims to address by clarifying that: Article 3 determines whether the GDPR applies to…

On November 15, 2019, the French Supervisory Authority (“CNIL”) published guidance on the use of facial recognition. The guidance is primarily directed at public authorities in France that want to experiment with facial recognition. The guidance warns that this technology risks leading to biased results because the algorithms used are not 100% reliable and the rate of false-positives may vary depending on gender and skin color. It sets out three general requirements for deploying facial…

On November 8, 2019, the Spanish Supervisory Authority (“SA”) issued detailed guidance on cookies and similar technologies in collaboration with stakeholders in the ad industry, including Adigital, Anunciantes, AUTOCONTROL and IAB Spain. The guidance is divided in 4 chapters: Chapter 1: scope of the Spanish cookie rules (Art. 22 of Law 34/2002); Chapter 2: terminology and definitions (g., types of cookies and terminal equipment); Chapter 3: obligations (in particular transparency and consent); and Chapter 4:…

On November 4, 2019, the Spanish Supervisory Authority (“AEPD”), in collaboration with the European Data Protection Supervisor, published guidance on the use of hashing techniques for pseudonymization and anonymization purposes. In particular, the guidance analyses what factors increase the probability of re-identifying hashed messages. The AEPD explains that the probability of re-identification increases if more information is available on the hash values used (e.g., that they were created on the basis of Spanish phone numbers…